concordance

A concordance is a constructed retrieval artifact: a systematic listing of the occurrences of a word or phrase within a specified text or corpus, each occurrence shown with its location and a fixed window of surrounding context. Its parameters: the corpus boundary (which text or collection is covered); the target set (a single keyword or phrase - a keyword concordance - or all content words - a running concordance); the context window (how many words precede and follow each occurrence); the ordering rule (alphabetical by headword, by location, or ranked by frequency); and the reference format (the notation by which locations are cited, e.g. book-chapter-verse). It persists as a finished, citable object: first as printed volumes (thirteenth-century biblical concordances, the 1613 Westminster Concordance, the 1969 Oxford Concordance) and now as databases and keyword-in-context (KWIC) software in corpus linguistics. Its persistence mechanism: each concordance is a completed index that readers, lexicographers, and corpus linguists cite, verify, and re-query without re-reading the source texts - the artifact carries the retrieval work itself. [formal: concordantia | substrate: mind | horizon: centuries | explicit: yes | epoch: 0.55]