American alt-rock band REM asked ‘What’s the frequency, Kenneth?’ way back in 1994, but frequency remains a very useful question for us and our students to ask today.
Unit 6 expands on the topic of concordancing by looking at frequency and distribution. This allows us to look not just at what kinds of words occur with or near our search term, but also offers the opportunity to compare how search terms are used in different discipline areas. In this way, we can start to move beyond the confines of our intutitions about subjects and look at what the data tells us instead.
