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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

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

Spyral

Tools and resources