A concordance in a way is a summary of the most important words or phrases with in a body of a text. And this is often used to identify the main theme or words of that text.

The first concordance, to the Vulgate Bible, was compiled by Hugh of St Cher (d.1262), who employed 500 monks to assist him. In 1448 Rabbi Mordecai Nathan completed a concordance to the Hebrew Bible. It took him ten years.

Since it took so long to do a concordance analysis prior to computers and tools of that nature, there were only a few bodies of work that were deemed important enough and worthy of the time and effort it took to compile such a list. However, nowadays this can be done rather quickly using all these computerized tools and in a way deemphasizing the importance of the results. What is the importance of the result you ask? Well to understand the main ideas that were present in the head of the writer or writers of a certain body of work one can begin to get a better understanding of the work, perhaps even a more guided understanding. This is important especially when you are trying to interpret a body of work, like in literature.

According to Svenja Adolph’s Introducing Electronic Text Analysis, a concordance analysis can lead to insights that are not easily generated on the basis of intuition alone. In other words the analysis can give us a better understanding of the work as a whole just by analyzing the patterns that are most common within it. This is easily missed especially in a long body of work or in multiple works by the same author. This kind of analysis can help us tie together all the works of say Shakespeare or Walt Whitman by taking a look at what the author most often talked about or referenced.

This is also a great tool when it comes to comparing main themes of a certain time, for example, what did the writers of the 18^th century want to address, and how did they do it. Or what did the women of northern Ireland want to express in the early 20th century. The search can be specific to a single author a gender a time or even a place. I think that this is a very interesting tool especially because we can get an insight about the writers and their personal beliefs, things that we might not really be able to do just by reading some of their popular works.