Concordance Wizard

By Sandra Schloen, August 2014

The Concordance Wizard, or the Dictionary-Discourse Lookup-Link tool (a.k.a. DLux), facilitates the process of linking discourse units -- that is "words" of a project's Texts -- to the project's dictionary. It is, in effect, the inverse of the Lexicography Wizard. Whereas the Lexicography tool assists in the process of linking words to the dictionary from the perspective of the Texts, this Concordance tool triggers the linking mechanism from the perspective of the Dictionary.

There is no special setup required for this tool. Simply navigate to a particular Attested form of a grammatical form of interest in the dictionary and click the Concordance Wizard button. The tool will query the texts for all words that are comprised of the same signs, or characters (in the case of alphabetic languages), as the current form.

Concordance Tool

In this example the wizard found 20 words, not yet linked to the Dictionary, which have the same 4 syllables as the current word. Words in the corpus of texts that are already linked to this form are not matched or listed here for consideration.

Note that this query, by definition, is looking for items not yet linked, and so it should be expected to take some time to complete a search within a large corpus of texts (a minute or two?). The query will use the attested form's syllables (here, separated by the dash character; this can be specified under Project Preferences, Epigraphic Sigla) as the basis for finding words comprised of epigraphic units representing the same signs. Epigraphic units will match either if their content is available as string-based Transliteration content, or if their content is based on links to script units (signs), depending on the epigraphic content available.

Matching words are presented in a pick-list that allows checklist-style selection. In this example, 20 matching words were found and 4 of them have been selected to be linked.

Use the Accept buttons to link the appropriate word(s) to this form.

  • Accept will link all words that have been selected in the check-list to this form

  • Accept Uncertain will make uncertain links from all selected words to this form

  • Accept All will link all items in the checklist, whether checked or not, to this form

There is no harm in (accidentally!) accepting the word more than once. If the word has already been linked it will not be linked again. Note that this means you cannot make a link uncertain after having accepted it already (you would need to go to that word in its texts and make the correction there). The list will reflect the items whose links have been assigned so that the Accept-actions can be made multiple times with different selections.

The Save button lets you save the list of words to a set (of discourse units). The set will be added to the Inbox in the Sets category where you can use it to further investigate this list of words.

Logogram Considerations

Note that even compound words that are comprised of a mix of logograms and syllabic readings will be found successfully by this tool.

Alphabetic Texts

So far all of our examples have been showing the use of the tool with a logosyllabic language but it works equally well for alphabetic texts. Analogously, the Concordance Wizard looks up and lists all words that have the same sequence and number of alphabetic characters as the current Attested form.

Just be sure to pay attention to the matching results. In many languages (particularly ancient languages without vowels) there may be a high number of homographs, and although OCHRE seems intelligent about finding and listing these, we do expect the scholar to have the final word as to whether or not links are appropriate!

Concordance Tool for Alphabetic Texts