The point of it…
This shows where the search word occurs in the file which the current entry belongs to. That way you can see where mention is made most of your search word in each file. Another case where the aim is to promote the noticing of linguistic patterning.
What you see
The plot shows:
File source text file-name
Words number of words in the source text
Hits number of occurrences of the search-word
per 1,000 how many occurrences per 1,000 words
Dispersion the plot dispersion value
Plot a plot showing where they cropped up, where the left edge of the plot represents the beginning of the text file ("Once upon a time" for example) and the right edge is at the end ("happily ever after". Though not in the case of Romeo and Juliet.).
If the settings permit, Concord can compute the context of each hit and show it to you.
Here the mouse was hovering over the 14th vertical mark and the status bar shows the context. To move from one hit context to the next, use the > and < arrows in the status bar.
Here we see a plot of "O" and another of "AH" from the play Romeo and Juliet. They are on separate lines because there were 2 search-words. There are more "O" exclamations than "AH"s.
Using View | Ruler, you can switch on a "ruler" splitting the display into segments.
The plot below is of one search-word (beautiful) in lots of texts.
The status-bar gives details of the highlighted text.
Multiple Search-words or Texts
If there are 2 or more search-words or texts, you will see something like this:
where the File column supplies the file-name and the search-word in that order. If you want it with the search-word first, go to the Concord settings in the Controller, What you see, and click here:
and re-sort the File list:
Double-click to see the source text
Just double-click in the File column:
Uniform view
There are two ways of viewing the plot, the default, where all plotting rectangles are the same length, or Uniform Plot (where the plot rectangles reflect the original file size -- the biggest file is longest). Change this in the View menu at the top. Here is the same one with Uniform plot. The blue edge at the right reflects the file size in each case.
If you don't see as many marks as the number of hits, that'll be because the hits came too close together for the amount of screen space in proportion to your screen resolution. You can stretch the plot by dragging the top right edge of it. You can export the plot using Save As and can get your spreadsheet to make graphs etc, as explained here.
Each plot window is dependent on the concordance from which it was derived. If you close the original concordance down, it will disappear. You can Print the plot. There's no Save option for the plot alone but you can of course save the concordance itself. You can Copy to the clipboard (Ctrl+C) and then put it into a word processor as a graphic, using Paste Special.
See also: plot and ruler colours, plot dispersion value, WordList dispersion statistic.