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Digital Scholarship Research Guide

Text analysis tools and methods

There are many text analysis methods that can be used to answer different kinds of research questions. Voyant, our featured tool, is one of the best places to start for those new to text analysis. Below is a summary of some other tools which are useful for different methods of text analysis. 

Natural Language Processing

A field of artificial intelligence that enables computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language in a meaningful way.

Concordancing

Creating an alphabetical listing of all occurrences of each principal word in a text corpus along with their immediate context; can be used to compare different usage of the same word or find common phrases and idioms.

Sentiment Analysis

Classifying text based on the emotional valence (positive, negative, neutral, etc.) of the words and phrases used.

Stylometry

The study of the literary style of a text; can be used to help identify the author of a text where the author is unknown or disputed.

Topic Modeling

Identifying potential topics or themes in a large text corpus by analyzing co-occurring words.

Featured tool

Voyant Tools icon

Voyant Tools is an open-source, web-based general purpose text analysis tool. It is a fantastic, easy to use platform and our recommended place to start if you've never done text analysis before.

Check out Voyant's documentation and guides for help getting started. 

Tutorials