Opening the app
All you have to do is open the app to begin using corpkit. If you get an “unidentified developer” error when you try to open the app, close the error message, and control-click/right-click the app and select Open that way.
Most of the things corpkit needs to run are embedded inside the app. A few things, however, might need to installed as you go along. In most cases, corpkit will prompt you if it cannot find a resource.
Java
You’ll need Java in order to search constituency trees. Your Mac will pop up a message if you don’t have the right Java installed, and will point you to a website where you can get it.
Once it’s installed, restart corpkit and try again. If the error persists, the reason is that your Mac actually pointed you to the wrong Java distribution. The one you need is here.
CoreNLP parser
Parsing files requires the download and installation of the Stanford CoreNLP parser. corpkit will manage this for you, installing the parser to your Home directory. It’s pretty large, so if you ever want to remove it, just delete the corenlp folder from your /users/yourname directory.
If you move the corenlp/ folder somewhere else, corpkit won’t automatically find it. You can tell corpkit where the parser is via the Set CoreNLP path option in the menu.
TeX
Finally, when plotting, The Use TeX option requires a TeX distribution. TeX is a typesetting system that the corpkit plotter can use to generate the text in the plot. It’s mostly useful if you’re writing up articles using TeX, and would like the fonts in your figures to match. If you don’t already have TeX, it’s probably not worth downloading TeX just for these images, as TeX installations can be gigabytes in size.
Settings
corpkit stores two kinds of settings. The first are project-specific settings, which are saved to the settings.ini file inside each project directory. These include annotation schemes, wordlists, TeX use, etc.
Global settings, such as the path to CoreNLP, recently opened projects, etc., are saved within the tool itself.