At the “Granice i przemiany: Inność, Doświadczenie, Innowacja w perspektywie humanistycznej” [Limits and transformation: Otherness, Experience, Innovation from a humanistic perspective] conference in Łódź, Poland, Agnieszka Ziora and Dominik Gęgotek presented a paper titled Modern tools for analyzing corpora – limitations and possibilities. Their presentation focused on a comparison of computational analysis software. The authors discussed existing solutions and presented examples of their use along with their strengths and weaknesses based on the authors’ research. Tools such as AntConc, Emotagger, LIWC, TextSTAT 3 and #LancsBox X were compared. Most of the presented examples were related to research on citizen science discourse in online forums, which is an area that gained popularity in recent years. The main limitations of the programs were: a slow perfomance on large corpora and a difficulty with retaining the context of the analysed texts. This aligns with the previous research on the topic of corpus linguistics (eg. Gillings et al., 2023, pp. 45-47). As a possible solution Dominik Gęgotek and Agnieszka Ziora proposed their planned open-source analysis tool based on database practices from other fields of science. This solution, could in theory improve the speed of searches and would alow for searching a corpus while retaining the context of the texts.

References:
Gillings, M., Mautner, G., & Baker, P. (2023). Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009168144