Intertextual Concordances

 

…αμην λεγω υμιν οτι εις εξ υμων παραδωσει με.

— the longest shared word sequence of the Fourth Gospel with the Synoptics

Joh 13:21b | Mk 14:18 | Mt 26:21

Intertextual Concordances

Generated by © Zbyněk Studenovský at Tue Dec 6 19:30:35 2005. Electronic texts used for Intertextual Concordances: GNT.

To view Greek, please make sure a Symbol font is already installed in your system. For more information see the Greek Transliteration used in Intertextual Studies.

Introduction

What is a concordance?

» The American Heritage Dictionary defines a concordance as “an alphabetical index of all the words in a text or corpus of texts, showing every contextual occurrence of a word.

Ten years ago, if you were working on an essay about romance in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and wanted to find every occurrence of the word “love”, you would have gone to a bookstore and bought a concordance of Frankenstein – a thick volume containing, in alphabetical order, every word in Frankenstein, followed by all the page numbers where the word occurs. That was ten years ago. Today, if you have “Frankenstein” online, you might pull it into your favourite word processor and execute a “find” command; unix-heads would use “grep”. Same thing.

What does fsconcordance do?

fsconcordance is a program that builds a concordance for one or more text files. It writes to HTML, making trivial the previously tedious task of going from the concordance to the text; all you need is a web browser and you’re ready to click.

But that’s not all. So far, we’ve seen nothing that a standard concordance doesn’t equal. But watch – fsconcordance is going to really shine in a moment.

Suppose you want a little more control over your textual analysis. You’re not merely interested in plain “love” – you want to find all the “youthful lovers” in the text. With only a standard concordance, you would have to look up all the “lovers” in the text, then check if they were “youthful”. Doable, but unenviable. The longer the phrases, the harder it gets. For eight-word phrases like “I shall be with you on your wedding-night”, a printed concordance becomes nearly useless. That’s where fsconcordance comes in.

The program intelligently generates concordances for phrases of any length; that is to say, it considers a standard concordance, which indexes lone words, simply a special case. It becomes just as easy to look up two words – “youthful lovers” – as one word – “lovers”.

It presents its findings in a variety of formats: sorted by frequency of occurrence, by letter, and all together … «


Source: Meng Weng Wong, All About fsconcordance, a tool for textual analysis by Meng Weng Wong (see The Perl Program fsconcordance.pl for more information].