Introduction to the new CLiC release: a corpus tool for literary texts

Participants will work with a brand-new release of the CLiC web app (version 1.6) before its official launch at the CLiC Dickens Day on 1 December. CLiC has been specifically developed for analysing literary texts. You’ll be able to explore the newly added children’s literature corpus and a collection of A-level and GCSE texts in addition to the core CLiC corpora of novels by Charles Dickens and other 19th century authors.

In this session, you will learn to use the standard corpus linguistic features of concordancing, generating clusters and keywords with CLiC. As the CLiC corpora are marked up for speech, you will be able to compare different ‘subsets’ of the corpora in order to explore differences between fictional speech and narration. We will also look into more qualitative analysis techniques by using the CLiC KWICGrouper in order to interactively group concordance lines and annotate them with customised tags.