Show/Hide Toolbars

WordSmith Tools Manual

Navigation: Concord

Dispersion Plot ()

Scroll Prev Top Next More

 

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.

 

conc plot with context

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.

 

romeo o and ah plot

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.

 

tog_plus        or double-click...

 

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.

 

plot of beautiful

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:

plot_two_search_words

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:

 

plot_files_before_search_words_setting

and re-sort the File list:

plot_two_search_words_sw_first

 

Double-click to see the source text

Just double-click in the File column:

conc_plot_double_clicked

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.

 

plot of beautiful_uniform

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.

 

tog_plus        Advanced plots

 

 

See also: plot and ruler colours, plot dispersion value, WordList dispersion statistic.