AntConc

Text documents are widely employed today for various tasks, from keeping track of simple, day-to-day activities and appointments to financial or healthcare information. Besides the increased number of text editors, one can also notice a slower, but steady rise in the number of analyzers.

These can be as simple as quick word counters to detailed linguistic analysis tools. AntConc strikes a good balance between the two and allows users to load and process multiple text documents at the same time. The program is compatible with most standard text document formats, including TXTs, HTMLs and XMLs.

An interesting feature of this tool is the ability to load entire folders, besides individual files. This allows one to make quick work of archives and documents directories. Once two or multiple files have been loaded, users have a wide range of tools at their disposal.

Seven utilities can be employed to analyze source documents, including a concordance module, a file viewer and a clusters tool. With them, one can search documents for common words and phrases. Using barcode-type plots, one can even view the location of the common items, within the host text files.

A notable and somewhat more diffuse tool is the “Clusters/N-Grams” module. With it, one can search the corpus for N length clusters. This is a useful method for detecting similar, but not identical words that are used in all source files. Once satisfied with their analysis, users can export all results to text, Excel and HTML formats.

To conclude, AntConc is a good tool for anyone interested in obtaining word frequency analyses from two or multiple text documents.