I'm a medievalist working largely with critical editions of Latin texts. I used to use R.J.C. Watt's Concordance program but it was not updated for new operating systems after 2016 and has now become unavailable. It allowed the user to encode subdivisions of the text (e.g., book|chapter|verse; title|page; author|work|division1|division2 -- it was very flexible). I haven't found anything else that quite does this.
AntConc only gives a reference to the file in which the target word or phrase is found. I'd find it valuable to have a location reference of the kind that are found in the traditional concordances to, say, Shakespeare (Play.Act.Scene.Line) or the Bible (Book.Chapter.Verse).
In my case I've been working on a complex 14th-century text divided into ten books of eight chapters each; in my edition I also numbered the paragraphs. Watt's program allowed me to encode these divisions as |b, |c, and |p and returned a location reference in the form 7.3.22. I suppose I could divide the work into 80 files named 1-1 to 10-8, which would give the book and chapter references, but it seems a bit of a kludge
A Watt concordance on a more complex text I was working on allowed encoding author|work|division1|division2|division3|division4 and gave results like Anon.JVC.Pref.10, and revealed whether the search target(s) were used by which authors and where in which work.
I understand that this functionality is not very important in much corpus linguistics, but it was a basic function in traditional concordances. I'm sure many potential users would find it valuable, as I would.
Could some functionality like this be incorporated into a future version of AntConc? Please forgive me if I am asking for something complex. -- Paul Chandler
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Revd Dr Paul Chandler, FRHistS
Holy Spirit Seminary | Banyo. Qld. 4014