The Reading Concordances in the 21st Century project proposes an innovative approach to reading concordances. In today's world, the amount of text communicated in electronic form is ever-increasing and there is a growing need for approaches to extract meanings from texts at scale.
Through the collaboration between the University of Birmingham and Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg we combine strengths in theoretical work in corpus linguistics with expertise in computational algorithms in order to develop a systematic methodology for reading concordances and corresponding algorithms for the semi-automatic analysis of concordance lines.
We will specifically implement the software FlexiConc to support the corpus linguist researcher in organising and interpreting concordances. To develop and test our approach, we will conduct two case studies. The first case study will focus on body language in fiction compared to non-fiction texts. The second case study will focus on political argumentation in social media, formalising its findings as corpus queries that can be used for automatic argumentation mining. Both case studies include a comparative dimension between English and German.