I’m afraid it’s been a few years since I heard their research presentations. The only specific tool I remember is AntConc [0], as I happen to know the developer. (I teach at a university in Japan, as does he.) But I think they mentioned other concordance and corpus-related tools as well.
Most of the researchers I remember were literature scholars. While they were comfortable using computers, not many of them seemed savvy enough to write their own programs, run their own servers, or even use grep.
