AntConc 3.5.2 Official Release for Windows, Macintosh OS X, and Linux

[Laurence Anthony]

Dear All,

This announcement is quite late, but I wanted to let you know that AntConc 3.5.2 is now available for download for Windows, Macintosh OS X, and Linux at the AntConc homepage:
http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/

I quietly released AntConc 3.5 at the start of year and since then I've made two small upgrades to address a couple of issues that I later discovered. I think this is now the most stable and fully featured version of AntConc to date. All the changes are documented in the version history, which you can find in the help menu of the software and also on the AntConc homepage.

Below are some of the new features in AntConc 3.5.

1. The numbers of rows presented in the Concordance Tool and lines plotted in the Concordance Plot Tool can now be restricted (or 'thinned') via the "Show Every Nth Row" option.

2. Two new statistics are included in the collocates tool preferences. These are "Log-Likelihood" and a two-level statistic " MI + Log-Likelihood (p > 0.05)" that combines the "Log-Likelihood" statistical measure at a threshold of p>0.05 with the MI effect-size measure.

3. The Concordance Plot tool has been improved to show hit numbers within the plots and also allow the plots to be saved to a postscript file. The postscript file can be easily converted to a PDF file through Adobe Acrobat or a similar tool (usually by just double clicking on the .ps file). In addition, the plot tool can now plot hits in a normalized fashion (as in previous versions) or using a relative length based on the length of the file.

4. Shortcuts are now adjusted on Macintosh OS X systems to more closely match normal keys.

5. The Word List Tool can now accept a file containing a word list.

6. The Keyword List Tool now offers a clearer set of keyword statistic critical values.

7. The Keyword List Tool now offers a choice of effect size measure by which to rank the results.

8. The Keyword List Tool now offers a 4-term Log-Likelihood keyness measure (set as default), which is considered to be the current best practice for Log-Likelihood keyness calculations.

9. The Word List Tool and Keyword Tool now use a backend database to do all processing. This speeds up the processing.

10. The encoding options now include an Auto-Detect option. This will be very successful at detecting Unicode encodings – e.g. UTF-8, UTF-16LE, UTF-16BE, and recent improvements means that it also has very good success at detecting many other legacy encodings. The detection engine is the same as that used in the FireFox web browser.

I hope you like the new version!

On a related topic, since AntConc was first released back in 2002, many people have asked about easy ways to donate something to support its development. I've delayed creating a method for many (many!) years because all the methods were either overly complicated or more costly to mange than it was worth. However, recently, I finally set up PayPal and Patreon accounts that make this much easier. PayPal allows for a one-off donation (you can choose the value) which is very easy to complete. Patreon runs a subscription service, which allows users to support the development over a longer term at different 'tiers' of support. It's a little more complicated to understand, but there are some clear advantages as it allows for more direct ways to communicate with users.

If you now go to the AntConc download page, you'll see that I've created links to both the PayPal and Patreon services. I really hope you don't find these links to obtrusive. If you have any thoughts of these two new donation methods, I would very much like to hear your opinions.

Best regards,

Laurence Anthony.

Creator of AntConc

###############################################################
Laurence ANTHONY, Ph.D.
Professor of Applied Linguistics
Faculty of Science and Engineering
Waseda University
3-4-1 Okubo, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 169-8555, Japan
E-mail: antho...@gmail.com
WWW: http://www.laurenceanthony.net/
###############################################################