Essentially, a concordance is a listing of individual word forms in a given specific context. A demonstration of what this may look like in its most basic form is provided below where you can type any word or part of a word in the text box and have the result highlighted in the text further down.
As an exercise, try this by searching for the words ‘this’, ‘very’, and ‘in’, and observe what happens. Do the results always correspond to what you would expect to happen?
Search term:
This is a short test paragraph to illustrate very basic concordancing. As you can see, in this basic form, concordancing is very similar to a Google search, only that it shows you the results in one ore more pre-selected pieces of text, rather than trying to find them online. The other thing is that our expectations concerning the results may differ from the actual output of the concordancer, as you will hopefully have noticed while concordancing on the words this and in. For the former, you might have expected to find both occurrences of the word with and without an initial capital letter, but the very first word of the paragraph did not in fact get highlighted because in general concordances tend to be case-sensitive, so that they will only find exact matches. This unfortunately resulted in you finding fewer occurrences than you would have expected, whereas the search for in gave you many more hits (i.e. search results) than you would probably have expected because the grapheme combination <in> occurs as part of a number of other words in this paragraph. Both of these issues are related to differences in the way that human readers and the computer process texts and we’ll explore options for handling them later.