Setting up CONC 1.80b for use with the Totoro transcript
Bill Pellowe, billp@gol.com

1. After starting the CONC program, from the "File" menu, click "new".

2. The first file we'll work with is the film transcript of "My Neighbor Totoro". It's on the floppy disk labled "TEXTS". First go into the "video" folder, and then go into the "totoro" folder. Finally, choose the Totoro file, and click "OK".

3. Next, we'll set our Options. From "Options", choose "Sorting".

4. Make sure you've got the settings checked below in the "Sorting Parameters" picture, especially where it says "Sort identical words by following words".

5. Next, we will set the text options. From "Options", choose "Flat text":

6. Make sure these two options are selected:

• Choose "References are marked by [ before and ] after".
  Why? In the Totoro text, all of the time information is marked in [ ] brackets. At one hour and 3 minutes into the video, the time marker is [TOT.1.03].
• Also choose "Skip SGML/HTML tags".
  Why? In the Totoro text, all of the extra information (such as scene descriptions) are marked with < before and > afterwards. (In the picture above, you can see one description at the bottom of the picture, "<Driving through the...")

7. OK, you're ready to build a concordance. From "Build", choose "word concordance".

8. Now we'll do the index. We have three options here. We can have an alphabetical index, or we can have the words listed by frequency, either high to low or low to high. Let's check it out. First click "Options" and choose "Index..."

9. Choose "Sort by frequency" and "descending order". This means that our index will start with the most freqent word.

10. Let's make the index. From "Build", choose "Index".

11. Next, let's make it easier for us to see everything at once. From "Windows", choose "Tile windows".

12. This picture below shows what you'll end up with. Clicking a word in one of the three windows will bring you to the occurances in other windows.

13. You can adjust the text by clicking on the "tab" markers and pulling them to the right or left.

(section two, titled "Appending files", shows you how to add additional files to make a larger corpus)