UBC Library
Research Commons
A multidisciplinary hub supporting research endeavours, partnerships, and education.
More from the Research Commons at (UBC-V)
And from the Center for Scholarly Communication (UBC-O)
What is text analysis?
Automated exploration of text using computational tools.
A way of "reading" from a distance.
A way to make sense of unstructured information.
Visual tools
GUI or "Graphical User Interface"
- Voyant tools is an example of a visual tool
- Have good affordance for beginners
- Can be misleading in their simplicity or when a visual representation can mean more than one thing
Scripting
- Gives you a lot of control over what you are doing
- Still using "tools" just without a visual interface
- Can be misleading if there's sparse documentation or if there's a confusing error message
What is Voyant
- An open-source, web-based application for analyzing text
Allows interpretation of texts or a corpus
Created by Stéfan Sinclair from McGill University and Geoffrey Rockwell at the University of Alberta
Caveats
- No tool works well without clean data
- Data cleanup will be a necessary step if or when using own data
- Avoid metadata and other information that might interfere with the core text
Why use Voyant
- Analyze online text or upload your own texts or corpus by pasting it directly into the text box
- Variety of formats, including plain text, HTML, XML, PDF, RTF, and MS Word
- Open Source software, strong community
- Shareable
Caveats
- No tool works well without clean data
Data cleanup will be a necessary step if or when using own data
Avoid metadata and other information that might interfere with the core text
Tools and resources
- Hathi Trust Research Center
- Text and Data Mining Guide
- The library regularly negotiates clauses into licensing contracts to allow TDM
- UBC Library Research Commons workshops and consultations
- Advanced Research Computing (ARC) consultants