Step 1 - Download and open Antconc

1. Open Antconc.

Step 2 - Configure Antconc to apply to texts a stopwords file

1. As shown in the screenshot below, click on the tab for "Tool Preferences" (labeled #1 in the screenshot)
2. In the dialogue that opens, click in the left Category sidebar on "Word List" (#2).
3. Check the button for "Use a stoplist below" (#3)
4. Click on "Open"(#4) and navigate to the location of an existing stopwords file on your computer. (A good stopwords file that you can download: Buckley-Salton Stoplist; see other stopword lists.) Selecting that file will populate the "Add Words From File" window in the dialogue.
5. Then click on "Apply."  This will apply the stopword list to text files operated on by Antconc in this session. (Antconc does not save this information between sessions unless you export settings [under the "File" tab] and then import settings when opening a new session.)

Step 3 - Load plain-text files to analyze into Antconc

1. As show in the screenshot below, load the text files you are working with into Antconc by clicking on the "File" tab and then on "Open Dir" (#1). Navigate to the folder containing your plain text files.
2. Click on the tab for "Word List" (#2)
3. Then click on "Start" (#3). Warning: If the number of files you are working on is very large, there will be a long wait as Antconc processes them (discovering words and counting their frequency). The processing of 2,000 files takes about 5 minutes (depending on the speed of your computer).

Step 4 - Analyze using Word List

1. As shown in the screenshot below, once Antconc has finished processing your corpus while in Word List view, it will show the words in your corpus (#3) ranked by ordinal number (#1) and frequency count (#2). 
2. A useful tool in Antconc that complements analysis by word frequency is the "Concordance" view. If you are not sure of the sense or context of a word you see in the word list as it is commonly used in our corpus, enter it in the Concordance view to get a keyword-in-text view of occurrences in context (see example). 

Step 5 - Analyzing phrases using "Clusters/N-grams"

1. As shown in the screenshot below, you can analyze the phrases in which important words occur by using Antconc's "Clusters/"N-grams" view. Click on the tab for the view to open it (#1)
2. Enter a word that you are interested in (#2)
3. Set the size of the clusters (phrases) containing the word that you want Antconc to find (#3)
4. Set whether the word you are interested in is at the beginning or end of the phrases you want Antconc to find (#4).
5. Examine the most frequent phrases.