For new
users. When you're starting with Wordcorr, there are a couple
of things you obviously have to do before you start working on real
data:
- download and set up the computer program
- get together the identifying information (metadata for
short) for
- yourself
- your data collection
- the speech varieties in
your data collection
- views (analytical points of
view) about your data collection
Setting up involves getting the
latest version of Wordcorr off the Internet, along with a couple of
behind-the-scenes things that make it work. It's all on the
Internet, accessible from this Web site. Or you may have access to
a CD-ROM or DVD that contains it. Then you install it on your
computer -- laptop or desktop, it doesn't matter.
Metadata. Identifying and
cataloguing information (known as metadata, data about data)
means that before you jump into using Wordcorr, you'll profit if
you invest a little time to get the hang of the terminology you'll
be using to identify the different kinds of information Wordcorr
deals with - information about
What Wordcorr does. You'll
also want to get familiar with the different kinds of things that
Wordcorr does for you in a data collection:
Please don't feel that you have to
pass a test on Wordcorr and comparative linguistics before you dare
do anything. Wordcorr is designed so that you can start doing
meaningful work the minute you have at least one entry's worth of
data entered or imported. And if you mess up something, there's
usually a way to back out of it gracefully. You learn the details
as you go.
If you want
more details right away, click here for How to use. |
Wordcorr Help is not very different from all the other
help files you've used. You activate it from the Help menu on the
main Wordcorr screen.
Its sections are written like
chapters in a book, except for the glossary at the end, so you can
read through on a topic sequentially if you like.
There are hyperlinks that take you
from one part of Help directly to other relevant parts. You can
even search on a particular term and have it come up highlighted on
all the topic pages that contain it.
There's also a lot of information
on this Web site about how things work. Just poke around.
The tutorial page
will take you to a broader perspective of how and why Wordcorr operates. |
