I’m proposing a hands-on session about the freeware concordance tool AntConc, which I am using to analyze the dialogue from the CW Network television program Supernatural (2005-present). Participants should download the appropriate version of AntConc to their laptops.

The Supernatural project looks for patterns in the 218 episodes of the program as a means of understanding things such as story arcs, character development, distinctions between characters, etc. It can also examine text in a variety of ways including by season or by writer.

Before the demonstration of AntConc I will take a few moments to discuss the issues surrounding the creation of the data being used in this project, and I will show Specter, an application that was written specifically for the Supernatural project. No download will be necessary or available for Specter. Specter is the creation of a University of Washington information science graduate student, and it combines two different formats, html and .srt, to produce a .txt file that deletes certain information and retains other information. The .txt files created by Specter are the data I am using in AntConc.

AntConc is more robust than other free textual analysis tools I have found. It has the capacity to accept several files for comparison, to incorporate inclusion and exclusion lists, to use truncation, phrase searching, and Boolean-style operators, to find keywords in context and words in proximity to other words, etc. Further, it does not require a great deal of expertise in computer assisted textual analysis to use.