Carcass Basic Tutorial

(by Eros Zanchetta)

Welcome to the Carcass Basic tutorial!

This short guide assumes no prior knowledge of the tool, and will walk you through the process of connecting to a remote server and submitting your first query.

This tutorial is based on Carcass version 0.44

Introduction

Carcass is a corpus query tool. It is a client application, which means it needs a working Internet connection to log into a server. For now, the only corpora you can use with Carcass are those hosted on the server.

If you're a glass half empty kind of person you'll think “Shoot, I cannot use my own corpora!”. If, on the other hand, you're a glass half full kind of person, you'll probably say “Cool, I don't need to provide the corpus, there are lots of corpora already available and I don't have to do anything to set-up them up!”

However you choose to look at it, at the moment it is not possible for regular users to add corpora to the system.

Connection to the server

Immediately after starting the program a dialog window will appear, requesting the parameters for the connections to the server.

You don't need to do anything here, just accept the default values by clicking on the “OK” button.

Selecting a corpus

After a few moments the main window of Carcass will appear, on the left you'll see a list of all available corpora, grouped by language.

Click on “English” to display all available English corpora.

Click on “UkWaC 1” to select the UkWaC corpus (more information on this corpus are available on this page).

As soon as you select the corpus, the query editors will appear:

As you can see from the picture above, you can choose between Simple, Smart and Expert query editor.

Submitting a query

For now let's just stick to the Simple editor (the Smart and Expert editors are covered in the advanced tutorial).

Type the following phrase in the box and click on Submit:

naked eye

In the next part of the tutorial you will see how to browse the results of your query.

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