# QWICK Overview

## What is QWICK?

QWICK is a tool for analyzing a set of corpora. With QWICK you can retrieve concordance lines from a corpus or corpora and investigate collocations within that set of concordance lines. QWICK provides a high degree of configurability for the searches, sorts and calculations you want to perform on your textual data.

There are no limits within QWICK on the amount of data you can work with. A query will return all hits within the available corpora for the node word specified. You can use QWICK with any size of corpus, but it is also particularly suitable for working with very large corpora.

When you specify a node word or words for a query, QWICK will search the corpora you have specified and return all matching concordance lines. You can scroll through this set of concordance lines, and sort or resort them according to the words to either side of the node word. You specify whether you want to sort on the word one or more places to the left or the right of the node word - again there is no upper limit.

To calculate collocations you have a choice of eight different evaluation functions. You can also specify a number of other parameters, such as the span to either side of the node word. QWICK presents a table of collocates, which you can then further sort according to joint or total frequency.

QWICK is implemented in Java, and will thus run on a variety of different platforms, including Windows, Unix and Macs. This means that you can use it on your Unix workstation at the office and also on your Mac or PC at home.

More information on how to work with QWICK is available in the User Documentation.

## QWICK and CUE

QWICK has been built using the CUE (Corpus Universal Examiner) class library, which was developed at Birmingham University for storing large text corpora in an efficient way. All the corpus material is compressed and fully indexed, so that access is extremely fast, no matter how large the corpus is. It supports XML annotations and provides a sophisticated query language for retrieval of words, tags, and combinations of both. For a more detailed description see the section on the CUE Query Language.

In order to use your own corpus material with QWICK, you have to index it with a special program. Documentation of how to index your own files is available on the QWICK web site. For the time being you can only run it on the pre-indexed data supplied on this CD.

## The CUE System

While QWICK is an application designed for corpus linguists, the class library it was built with, CUE, has been designed for application programmers. It provides an API for high-level access to efficiently encoded corpus material, and can be used to create applications similar to QWICK. Due to the use of the Java language CUE is platform independent, as is QWICK.

On the Corpus Research Website you can find more details about CUE, such as full API documentation and a description of how to do things with corpora. CUE itself is also available for downloading from that site.

## Software Requirements

QWICK has been implemented using Sun Microsystem's Java Development Kit version 1.2 beta. For running QWICK on your computer you need the runtime environment; the Windows version of it is included on this CD. See the Installation Instructions for full instructions how to install the JDK along with Qwick on your machine. If you are not using QWICK with Windows, you will have to download the correct runtime environment from the Sun Java Website before you install Qwick.

## Hardware Requirements

There are no specific hardware requirements for QWICK, although a minimum of 16MB of RAM is recommended. Your screen resolution should be at least 800 by 600, with 256 or more colours.

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