the collins sampler
The Collins sampler | Sally Hirst | July 1st, 2005
A query to those who are technically wise,
I haven't used the Collins sampler since it reappeared. It used to work just fine on the old computer (with an older version of windows and explorer), but i can't get it to work now. I am using Windows XP and whatever version of Explorer was likely to come with that and now this address just doesn't do anything. Yes, I have remembered to disable the pop up block thing at the top of the screen- is there another one somewhere that I don't know about?
I type in the word, click on 'show concs' and the page refreshes, but it doesn't produce concordances.
I have no problem with others like BNC and the web concordancer, it's just Collins that won't cooperate, but then it was Collins that used to line the output up in a user friendly way.
Any suggestions? (In entirely non-tecnical language, please)
Sally
Re: The Collins sampler | Ramesh Krishnamurthy | July 3rd, 2005
Hi Sally,
The address you give (http://www.collins.co.uk/corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx) is correct, and from the symptoms you describe ("doesn't do anything"), I'm fairly sure that your problem is still to do with 'pop-up' windows, and to do with your web browser ("whatever version of Explorer").
Try "Preferences" or "Settings" in the browser toolbar (it may be in the drop-down list under 'Edit' or 'Tools') within the 'Security and Privacy' heading...
Once you have enabled pop-ups, the Collins sampler should work.
Hope this helps.
Ramesh
Re: The Collins sampler | Sally Hirst | July 4th, 2005
Thanks Ramesh,
You were right. For any one else as technically challenged as I am, the button that mattered (as opposed to the three others that said they blocked or unblocked pop ups, but made no difference) turned out to be a little unlabelled blue and green globe on the top right of the tool bar.
What on earth possessed me to do something that involved the computer in the first place?
Sally
Editor's Note: Here is what the top of the Collins Sampler page says:
Corpus Concordance Sampler
The Collins WordbanksOnline English corpus is composed of 56 million words of contemporary written and spoken text. To get a flavour of the type of linguistic data that a corpus like this can provide, you can type in some simple queries here and get a display of concordance lines from the corpus. The query syntax allows you to specify word combinations, wildcards, part-of-speech tags, and so on.
with 
and 
