AntConc
Free software for concordancing and corpus analysis, created by Laurence Anthony.
What it is for in forensic linguistics
AntConc helps you examine how a word or expression is used across a set of texts: how often, in what contexts, and alongside which words. This is useful for explaining utterance meaning from real usage, comparing writing styles, and studying the language of legal documents.
Basic steps
- Prepare the corpus. Save each text as a UTF-8 .txt file. Anonymise names and personal data before analysis.
- Load the corpus. Open AntConc, then create a new corpus from your text files or folder using the corpus manager.
- Concordance (KWIC). Type a keyword, for example “ancam*”, to see every occurrence with its left and right context. Sort by the words to the right or left to find patterns.
- Word list. See which words occur most often. Compare that with what you would expect for the genre.
- Collocates and clusters. Find words that tend to co-occur with the keyword, and repeated word sequences (n-grams).
- Keywords (keyness). Compare your corpus with a reference corpus to see which words stand out statistically.
- Record your steps. Save the settings, software version, and exported results so the analysis can be repeated and checked by others.
Menu names may differ between versions. Follow the official documentation for the version you install.
Practice corpus
Five short invented texts (not from real cases) for practising concordances and word lists: korpus-latihan-iifll.txt.