Explore Colloquial Word Use in a Text

This exercise uses this Recipe and the Googlizer Tool to generate Dynamically Aggregated Text and then uses tools such as a concordance and frequency list to explore the colloquial use of the word ain’t. . It applies a recipe to real textual examples freely available on the internet so you can do the steps yourself and see the results.

Exercise Steps

1. Login into TAPoR >>discussion;
2. Run the TAPoR Googlizer collect some web pages related to your topic. In this case we will input ain’t as a search term and leave the other parameters as default.
3. When the search results are returned, choose to save them to the Databench with a title such as “Ain’t Results”;
4. Run TAPoR Find Words - Concordance Tool using Ain’t Results as the concordance term from the Databench result.
5. This returns a concordance similar to:
   
   

1. The word ain’t is used in a variety of ways in the collection of text that we Let's see how these words are used within the text collected from Google.
2. Use the Collocation tool to explore what words are associated with the term ain’t;
3. When the tool is run on the Ain’t Results using ain’t as the word/pattern, we get the following results:
   
   

   Summary: There are 81 unique words and there are 121 words in total. 65 words occurred once and 9 words occurred twice.
   Words		Counts
   I	------	8
   A	------	7
   And	------	6
   Woman	------	6
   Me	------	4
   	------	4
   Sojourner	------	3
   Aicn	------	2
   To	------	2
   Cool	------	2
   It	------	2
   The	------	2

   
   

   We see that the personal pronoun I is the most common cojunctor for ain’t.

   
   

Discussion

This recipe uses the Databench functionality of the TAPoR so it is important that you actually be logged in to TAPoR. To obtain a guest account, go here.

Next Steps/Further Information

1. List of All Recipes
2. Recipe for Exploring Colloquial Word Usage in a Text
3. Help with Particular Tools
4. Background on Text Analysis

-- ShawnDay – 21 October 2006