Text analysis, also known as text mining, distant reading, and computational linguistics, is the process of using software to extract meaningful information from a body of text by identifying entities, patterns, relationships, etc. Often text mining can help to address research questions about large bodies of text that are impossible (or extraordinarily difficult) to answer through normal human reading alone (we call this close reading). Text mining tools are meant to compliment rather than replace traditional human-driven literary analysis. With any research method, a content expert’s intervention is necessary to identify how meaningful the results of any text mining process are and to interpret those results in a responsible way.
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