Layout of AntConc

Overview

Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• How is data organised in AntConc?

• How do I access different tools in AntConc?

Objectives

• Locate controls for navigating data in AntConc

• Find options for working with data

The layout of AntConc

The main window has a long pane on the left in which the file or files that are to be analysed are listed (the Corpus Files).

To the right of this, the main pane displays the tool that is currently being used and the outputs of that tool. When you first open AntConc the default tool shown is the Concordance tool and the output window is blank.

At the top of the main pane are a series of tabs, the leftmost of which reads Concordance. The six other tools are Concordance Plot, File View, Clusters/N-grams, Collocates, Word List, and Keyword List, and these are selected by clicking on tabs.

Each of these tools have a Start button that can be used to launch the tool and/or a query, and a range of other options (some of which are specific to individual tools) that are used to refine that query. Note that once you start using AntConc tools to run queries against a dataset, the output windows of tabs you have yet to use may begin to populate.

Away from the main pane, the navbar has four options:

• File we have seen when importing data into AntConc, but it also has options for removing files, clearing tools (that is, emptying the output window), saving outputs to file, and both importing and exporting AntConc settings (more on which in the next episode!).
• Help, which includes links to helpful resources and in some version a search box.
• Global Settings, which contains settings that apply to all tools, including font sizes and colours.
• Tool Preferences, which contains tool specific settings.
  • Note: in some versions of AntConc Global Settings and Tool Preferences appear together under the heading Settings.

Key Points

• Many options for working with data in AntConc are accessed through a menu pane below the output window