Keyword-in-Context (KWIC) Analysis
Keyword-in-context (KWIC) analysis is the indexing and display technique that presents every occurrence of a chosen keyword aligned in a fixed central column, flanked by a set span of the words that precede and follow it. Invented by H. P. Luhn in 1960 to index technical literature, the KWIC format became the standard way to read a concordance: by stacking instances of the keyword so they line up vertically, it lets an analyst scan the surrounding co-text for recurrent neighbors and patterns. It is the specific display layer underlying broader corpus concordance work, valued because alignment turns a list of scattered occurrences into a visually legible pattern. Today KWIC views are the default output of every corpus-analysis tool and the entry point for studying collocation, colligation, and meaning in context.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Luhn, H. P. (1960). Key word-in-context index for technical literature (KWIC index). American Documentation, 11(4), 288–295. · DOI 10.1002/asi.5090110403
- Sinclair, J. (1991). Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford University Press. · ISBN 9780194371445
- Anthony, L. (2004). AntConc: A learner and classroom friendly, multi-platform corpus analysis toolkit. In Proceedings of IWLeL 2004: An Interactive Workshop on Language e-Learning (pp. 7–13). Waseda University. · URL
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.