Software:CLOC

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Short description: First generation general purpose text analyzer

CLOC (an acronym derived from CoLOCation) was a first generation general purpose text analyzer program. It was produced at the University of Birmingham and could produce concordances as well as word lists and collocational analysis of text. First-generation concordancers were typically held on a mainframe computer and used at a single site; individual research teams would build their own concordancer and use it on the data they had access to locally, any further analysis was done by separate programs.[1]

History

CLOC was written by Alan Reed in Algol 68-R which was available only on the ICT 1900 series of computer at that time. Perhaps because it was designed for use in a department of linguistics rather than by computer specialists it had the distinction of having a comparatively simple user interface,[2] it also has some useful features for studying collations or the co-occurrence of words.[3]

CLOC was used in the COBUILD project that was headed by Professor John Sinclair.[4][5]

Further reading

  • Alan Reed (1978). CLOC User Guide. University of Birmingham, Computer Centre. 
  • Alan Reed (1977). CLOC: a colocation package. ALLC Bulletin 5, 168-73. 

References

  1. Concordancing tools - Lancs University website
  2. https://www.fujitsu.com/uk/Images/ICL-Technical-Journal-v01i03.pdf Susan Hockey, 1979. Computing in the Humanities - ICL Technical Journal Vol 1 Issue 3 pp 289
  3. "Susan Hockey". http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acl/associates/permanent/hockey.htm. 
  4. https://www.laurenceanthony.net/research/20130827_linguistic_research_paper/linguistic_research_paper_final.pdf Laurence Anthony (2013), A critical look at software tools in corpus linguistics, Linguistic Research 30(2), 141-161
  5. https://www.academia.edu/3735394/Software_review_CLOC review CLOC by Lou Burnard Computers and the humanities 14 (1980) 259-260