Siting of fragmentsA similar analysis for the Concordance Method is rather difficult to carry out.The comparison of text letter sequences with fragment lines, which occupies the time of the Partial Concordance Method, is of course completely avoided, but it is necessary to construct a concordance having as many entries as there are letters in the text.For a text of 10 5 letters, this is a very sizeable operation and, in the author's experience, it would take rather longer than the Partial Concordance Method.The Concordance Method, however, has one special feature of merit: the concordance of letter sequences, whose construction takes up nearly all the processing time, is independent of the set of fragments given.The same concordance will therefore serve again if this text is to be searched for further sets of fragments.Now a high proportion of all the sets of fragments discovered derive from a few works only (notably certain sections of the Old and New Testaments).For these works it would be worthwhile to use the Concordance Method, and to retain on magnetic tape, or print, the letter sequence concordance.Thereafter, any further sets of fragments from these texts could be located either by a relatively fast search program, or by human reference to the printed version.
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E. A. Newman (1965) studied this question.