CLiC 1.6 release: new interface & more books!

We are excited to announce a new release of CLiC, which takes us up to version 1.6. (Technical reader can have a look at the changes to the code in our Github repository!)

The delegates of the Integrating English 2017 conference  were the first to use the live CLiC 1.6 release on Friday 3 November, trying it out both in the desktop and the mobile version. [For a full overview of the programme as reported on Twitter, check out the #IntEng2017 hashtag or directly go to the Integrating English 2017 Storify.]

LOVING the possibilities of @CLiC_Dickens – corpus approaches to literature in the classroom #IntEng2017 #digital #digitalliteracy #edtech pic.twitter.com/R58lqCMmLF

— Superintendent Harte (@mat_harte) November 3, 2017

Some great ideas shared at #IntEng2017: rereading, overlapping Lang and Lit, using Clic, dialect and discourse analysis. Thanks to all!

— Alan Elliott (@AlanElliott3) November 3, 2017

So what has changed in CLiC 1.6? If you have used CLiC previously and now have a look at clic.bham.ac.uk, you’ll immediately notice a substantial difference in the layout and overall design. Among the obvious changes are the new home page with a table of contents and the analysis tabs in the menu on the right-hand side. One of the advantages of this layout is that your corpora or individually chosen books will stay selected as you move from one tab such as the Concordance tab to another, for example  Clusters.

We are particularly excited to showcase the considerable addition to our corpora: we have added over 90 books! A large portion of these new books belongs to ChiLit, the 19th Century Children’s Literature corpus which CLiC hosts in collaboration with the GLARE project. ChiLit contains 71 books from authors such as Lewis Carrol, Beatrix Potter and E. Nesbit. A full list of the titles can be found in the new CLiC User Guide in the CLiC Help Menu. In a forthcoming guest post on this blog Anna Cermakova from the GLARE project will contextualise the selection principles for the titles in the ChiLit corpus.

In addition, we have made a point to stress the CLiC focus on providing a useful tool for GCSE and A-Level teaching. Therefore, we have added another pre-selected selection of text, ‘Other’, which contains more set texts from the AQA, OCR and Edexcel GCSE and A-Level English specifications, so that CLiC now contains 38 books listed in at least one of these specifications. For a detailed overview of the CLiC books listed in the specifications, please see the appendix to the CLiC User Guide. Among the additions, A Christmas Carol and The Sign of Four were particularly welcomed by delegates at #IntEng2017, who are teaching these titles in school and can now use CLiC as a resource in their classrooms. Other users have, for example, shown interest in the newly added Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Which new CLiC book are you most interest in?

We will celebrate the successful conclusion of our project and the launch of the new CLiC release with our CLiC Dickens Day on 1 December at the Birmingham and Midland Institute. This half-day of workshop activities and talks will be followed by a drinks reception and a dramatic reading of Oliver Twist. These activities are free, but please make sure to register for the afternoon talks and evening reception/reading (separately!), as places are limited.

We hope that you’ll enjoy the new CLiC 1.6 interface and that the User Guide will be helpful in adjusting to the changes. Feel free to get in touch (clic@contacts.bham.ac.uk and @CLiC_Dickens on Twitter) with questions and feedback; we are keen to know how you use CLiC. And watch this space for upcoming resources – we will be posting videos about the new interface and corpora in the coming weeks.