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What is a Web Concordance?

A Web Concordance is a computer-generated concordance which has been translated into HTML and split into a number of files suitable for use with a web browser. It can be browsed on the computer where it was created, and if desired can be placed on a web server and made available on an intranet or on the Internet.  

This program allows you to make Web Concordances of your own.
You must have registered the program before you are permitted to make a Web Concordance available to anyone else.

The original Web Concordances, which were created by the author of this program, are at http://www.dundee.ac.uk/english/wics/wics.htm  At that site you can also find fuller documentation covering a brief history of concordances, the issues surrounding concordances on the Web, and a study of ways to implement web concordances.

Why put a concordance on the Web?

Concordances can be thought of as naturally hyperlinked text - perhaps the first ever example of hypertext - since every entry in a concordance comes with a reference which is a pointer to a particular location in another text, the source text of the original work.  As such, concordances are natural candidates for implementation in HTML.  

They are also well suited to the Web,  which solves some of the problems of printed concordances and offers some further advantages:
  • Printed concordances can be cumbersome, and are always expensive, often to the point where they are not viable as commercial publications. The web makes it possible to create specialised concordances at low cost.
  • Web Concordances are accessible to many users simultaneously and hence suitable for class-based activity and student-centred learning.
  • Editorial and software expertise is not demanded of users, who are presented with a ready-to-use concordance instead of having to construct their own, and with a browser interface which is already familiar.  Thus two of the important advantages of the printed book, its ready-made nature and its familiar usability, are brought to computer concordancing.  
  • Web Concordances supplement a basic concordance with a vocabulary list and a full version of the original literary text, all hypertextually linked for ease of reference.


    See also: 
    What is a Concordance?
    Building Web Concordances
    HTML Setup
    HTML Details

    Other related topics