175-204 Computing for Language and Literature Studies

Note

Available as 175-304 at 3rd-year level.

Credit Points

Coordinator

Prerequisites

None

Semester

Contact

Subject Description

This subject provides an introduction to the basic concepts and tools available for the use and analysis of texts in literature and language studies. Students will learn to manipulate texts as data for their research, and to be familiar with computing applications such as concordancing, electronic dictionaries, and marked-up texts. The emphasis is on practical training, and learning how to use available software tools for text analysis. Topics covered include: Electronic texts and corpora: - existing corpora and corpus creation - electronic dictionaries String handling and lexical analysis: - computing word count, word frequency and word-type frequency in texts - lexical retrieval and collocations Concordances: - generating key-word-in-context concordances for a text - using concordances for text analysis Textual Analysis: - computing number and percentages of sentences of various lengths in a texts, with graphs of results (e.g. for studies of text complexity) - computing percentages of words in several texts at the same time (e.g. for comparison of vocabulary in literature studies) - recording the relative location of words in texts and graphing positions Text formatting and encoding: - TEI and HTML - processing texts with SGML markup

Assessment

Regular assignment problems, a mid-term examination and a final project, totalling 5,000 words.

Prescribed Texts

A reading package and documentation for the software used in class will be made available at the beginning of the semester.