Building your own corpus – first steps in AntConc

Another installment in building your own corpus, check out the previous ones if you haven’t already.

This time we’ll look at the first steps, Wordlist, Keyword list and Save settings, to make in AntConc once you have your text file(s) as you want it.

Step one would be to make a wordlist. First go to the Tool Preferences>Category>Wordlist and make sure the Treat all data as lowercase checkbox is ticked:

Press Apply and then go to the Wordlist tab and click the Start button, you will get a screen like this :

Not surprisingly function words top the list. We are more interested in content words so we can go on to step two which is the keyword list function. Go to the Tool Preferences>Category>Keyword List:

Here you will need to load a reference corpus e.g. the Brown word list. Press the Add Files button and locate your copy of the reference corpus. As the reference corpus used is a word list and not a raw file you need to click the Use word list(s) radio button then press the Load button and the bar to the right will fill in green once the reference corpus is loaded:

Now press the Apply button, when you get back to the Keyword List window press the Start button and your screen will look similar to this:

Finally step three is to go to File>Export Settings to File and save your settings. Now we have everything we need to start exploring our corpus. Stay tuned for related posts.