CLOC (an acronym derived from CoLOCation) was a first generation general purpose text analyzer program. It was produced at the

University of Birmingham , mottoeng = Through efforts to heights , established = 1825 – Birmingham School of Medicine and Surgery1836 – Birmingham Royal School of Medicine and Surgery1843 – Queen's College1875 – Mason Science College1898 – Mason Univers ...

and could produce concordances as well as word lists and

collocation In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words th ...

al analysis of text. First-generation

concordancer A concordancer is a computer program that automatically constructs a concordance. The output of a concordancer may serve as input to a translation memory system for computer-assisted translation, or as an early step in machine translation. Concor ...

s were typically held on a

mainframe computer A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterpris ...

and used at a single site; individual research teams would build their own concordancer and use it on the data they had access to locally, any further analysis was done by separate programs.

History

CLOC was written by Alan Reed in

Algol 68-R ALGOL 68-R was the first implementation of the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 68. In December 1968, the report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 68 was published. On 20–24 July 1970 a working conference was arranged by the International Federation ...

which was available only on the

ICT 1900 series ICT 1900 was a family of mainframe computers released by International Computers and Tabulators (ICT) and later International Computers Limited (ICL) during the 1960s and 1970s. The 1900 series was notable for being one of the few non-American ...

of computer at that time. Perhaps because it was designed for use in a department of linguistics rather than by computer specialists it had the distinction of having a comparatively simple user interface, it also has some useful features for studying collations or the co-occurrence of words. CLOC was used in the

COBUILD COBUILD, an acronym for Collins Birmingham University International Language Database, is a British research facility set up at the University of Birmingham in 1980 and funded by HarperCollins, Collins publishers. The facility was initially led by ...

project that was headed by Professor John Sinclair.https://www.academia.edu/3735394/Software_review_CLOC review CLOC by

Lou Burnard Lou Burnard (born 1946 in Birmingham, England) is an internationally recognised expert in digital humanities, particularly in the area of Markup language, text encoding and digital libraries. He was assistant director of Oxford University Computi ...

Computers and the humanities 14 (1980) 259-260

References

History of software {{software-stub

History

Further reading

References