Despite the central role of the computer in corpus research, programming is generally not seen as a core skill within corpus linguistics. As a consequence, limitations in software for text and corpus analysis slow down the progress of research while analysts often have to rely on third party software or even manual data analysis if no suitable…

WordSmith Tools, since its launch in 1996, has had a rather unusual history and the aim of this paper is to record some of the chief influences on its development. The paper thus presents and discusses the history of WordSmith Tools and its predecessors going back to the early 1980s when processors were much slower, memory very limited and disk…

This article presents a series of guidelines both for researchers in search of software to be used in linguistic analysis and for programmers designing such software. A description of the intended audience and the types of software under consideration and a review of some relevant literature are followed by a discussion of several important…