The Third Program
The next step one should take is to run the material — now
from
a computer tape since the material must be on a tape to generate the
frequency-list — through the machine to generate the preliminary
concordance. This program should give an output of a complete
alphabetized list of words in the work with only the line numbers in which
the words appear. It may be possible to get a line concordance at this stage
(for shorter texts — say under 5,000 lines of verse), but that is not
needed. It is from such a list that the concordancer works to separate
further homographs which he no doubt will find during the proofreading,
to help him refer to the text to verify peculiar spellings, to help in the
gathering of variant spellings which will eventually be listed under a single
headword, and so on. I found several errors which slipped by me in the
other proofreading phases of the project when I had this preliminary
concordance.[9]