Literary research tool can provide concordance and many other textual statistics relating to authorship or sequence of composition. Mechanical text manipulation provides wide variety of text formats and conventions (such as upper case). This program is written in FORTRAN H for use on IBM-360 computer

Ule, L. A.

English

NASA Technical Reports Server

March 1973	 B73-10049 
NASA TECH BRIEF. I	 Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center 
NASA Tech Briefs announce new technology derived from the U.S. space program. They are issued to encourage 
commercial application. Tech Briefs are available on a subscription basis from the National Technical Information 
Service, Springfield, Virginia 22151. Requests for individual copies or questions relating to the Tech Brief program may 
be directed to the Technology Utilization Office, NASA, Code KT, Washington, D.C. 20546. 
A Comprehensive Program for Textual

Concordances and Statistics 
I.
The program is a literary research tool that can provide 
a concordance and many other textual statistics relating 
to authorship or the sequence of composition. 
The program could be used with machine-readable 
text. Thus, once machine-readable text becomes availa-
ble, one could economically maintain a running index 
of what one has written along with a count of the total 
number of words. Furthermore, the program may be 
used to search through machine-readable material to 
find desired passages or specific subject matter. 
For statistical validity, more than usual emphasis is 
placed on the importance of common words. Because 
they occur in such large numbers, common words are 
the most reliable statistical inference of authorship or 
chronology. 
The program uses mechanical text manipulation and 
has provisions for a wide variety of text formats and 
conventions (such as upper case). It will not, in general, 
be necessary to change existing machine-readable text 
for use with this program, and several different outputs 
are offered. All data may be obtained through the 
printer, or the results may be plotted as statistical 
distribution curves. Furthermore, both tape and cards are 
available for further machine processing. For example, 
one may wish to make composite concordances of the
one or several writers, or correlations of the statistics of 
several texts to determine the most probable authorship 
or sequence of composition. 
Notes: 
1. Program instructions are given in two parts. The first 
is a complete users guide, and the second contains a 
more detailed description of the source programs and 
definitions of all the program terms. 
2. This program is written in FORTRAN H for use on 
an IBM-360 computer. 
3. Inquiries concerning this program may be addressed 
to:
COSMIC 
112 Barrow Hall 
University of Georgia 
Athens, Georgia 30601 
Reference: MSC- 17484
Source: L. A. Ule of

Rockwell International Corp.

under contract to

Johnson Space Center
(MSC-17484) 
Category 09 
This document was prepared under the sponsorship of the National
	 Government assumes any liability resulting from the use of the 
Aeronauticsand Space Administration. Neither the United States
	 information contained in this document, or warrants that such use 
Government nor any person acting on behalf of the United States
	 will be free from privately owned rights.
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A comprehensive program for textual concordances and statistics

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