Springer has introduced an online concordancer, Exemplar, that uses the texts from their 1900 journals as a corpus. The journals cover fields of study from life sciences, medicine, engineering and mathematics to computer science, business, and law.
The good thing about it is that you can search the individual fields of study or even the individual journals. This way the user can really adjust their language to their field of expertise or even the country where the journal is published. That’s great.
However, it seems that Springer offers the concordancer less as a support and more as a new sales technique. Clicking on the node word in a concordance line will namely get you to the original article where the sentence is used. Which is good as you can check the author’s data, abstract etc. And of course you can buy the article if you need it too. But the problem is that you cannot do anything else with your hits. You cannot sort the concordance lines, you cannot set the number of words you want to see to the left or right of the node word, and you cannot export the hits as html or image for off-line use in the classroom or embed them in your teaching materials. Not to mention the fact that they do not provide information about the part of the article where a particular word occurs. It’s well known that words have a tendency to appear not just with particular words but also in particular parts of a clause or sentence and in particular parts of paragraphs or text. Not much is needed for these extra facilities.
Since I find it hard to believe that people at Springer don’t know what teaching academic writing is really about, the only conclusion I can come to is that they are not sincere in their desire to help teachers and that this is just another marketing gimmick which aims to boost Springer’s sales of articles.
P.S.
Springer could also help corpus linguists carry out research into academic genres if the concordancer had additional facilities. But it doesn’t.
Filed under: Corpora, ESP, Language tools, Teaching
