Version 12 of Corpus Presenter constitutes a major upgrade of the program. It has been expanded in a number of ways, for instance with respect to the exporting of data and the interface to well-known commercial products. First and foremost is the export of data from both basic and advanced search levels to Microsoft Excel. On either level you can choose to export the contents of a returns grid to an Excel table. This is done automatically after you specify and confirm the output table file which is to be written during the export process. It is furthermore possible to generate charts in Microsoft Excel from the data which is exported from Corpus Presenter. To export the contents of any returns grid, click on the button Export to Excel on the Basic Search level or choose the option ‘Export returns to Excel’ in the ‘Returns’ menu on the Advanced Search level.
The Word List module has been completely restructured, both expanded in its functions and simplified in its interface. Furthermore, the statistics module has been integrated into the options of the Word List module. This is now menu-driven with a tool bar of icons for the main functions. The export options for the word lists have been expanded, allowing you to now export the contents of a returns grid to a Microsoft Excel table. The Word List module, like all other search routines, will generate both raw frequencies and standardised frequencies, same N / 1000 items, for all finds. The standardised frequencies are useful when comparing data from files of different sizes.
The lists generated by all search routines in all modules can be stored to a text file, a database, an Excel table or just to the Windows clipboard and can act as input to any statistical package which you may wish to use.
One of the main expansions of the Word List module is to interface with the ‘Keyness’ module. With the latter you can test for differences between word lists generated from any two corpora, e.g. that of a group of authors and that of a single author. By these means you could, for example, ascertain whether there are stylistic differences between a particular author and others of his era. Corpus Presenter produces statistics which show the differences between any two corpora and the program can export these to Microsoft Excel where these differences can be displayed as a chart.
The ability to examine texts for lexical clusters, previously only contained in Corpus Preseter Text Tool, has now been expanded and integrated into the main program, Corpus Presenter.
The functions pertaining to file listing and loading have been drastically improved so that you can now load a large number of files – say 5,000 – in a second or two (the exact time required depends on the speed of your computer).
The context-sensitive help function has been greatly expanded, offering immediate, visually effective help, for all the major modules of the main program, Corpus Presenter.
Many of the utility programs which accompany Corpus Presenter have been further improved, e.g. the Find Text and the Make Tree utilities. With the latter you can interactively design a CPD (dataset control file) which Corpus Presenter uses to display the files of a corpus in tree form on the desktop.
Version 12 of Corpus Presenter has been successfully tested on a number of computers running under the Windows 7 operating system.
Users should take care to work with the February 2012 build of Corpus Presenter 12 (this is the version available on this website).
Raymond Hickey
February 2012
PS: To make the labelling in Corpus Presenter easier to grasp the Quick Locate option has been renamed Basic Search and the Text Retrieval option is now termed the Advanced Search option.
Legacy versions of Corpus Presenter (versions 7 - 11)
