Plots and Key-word Links

KeyWords > KeyWords: links

The point of it…

is to find out which key-words are most closely related to a given key-word.

A plot will show where each key word occurs in the original file. It also shows how many links there are between key-words.

What are links?

Links are "co-occurrences of key-words within a collocational span". An example is much easier to understand, though:

Suppose the word elephant is key in a text about Africa, and that water is also a key word in the same text. If elephant and water occur within a span of 5 words of each other, they are said to be "linked". The number of times they are linked like this in the text will be shown in the Links window.

What you see

This Links window shows the number of links followed by a column headed "in" and a percentage. This percentage represents the number of links divided by the total number of occurrences of the word in question (the "in" column number). Thus if you choose to see the links of elephant, and elephant crops up 10 times in your original text, and all 10 of those times it's found near the word water, (even though water occurs 40 times altogether), you'll see 100%. If you choose to see the links of water, the percentage next to elephant will be 25%.

The collocation horizons are those set in Concord, and go up to 25 words to left and right. The default is 5,5.

Double-click on any word in the plot listing to call up a window (up to maximum of 20 windows) which show the linked key-words.

See also: Plot calculation, KeyWords clusters