Text Analysis

Text Analysis Resources 

Welcome to the Berea College Hutchins Library text analysis resource guide. 

What is text analysis?
Text analysis became a part of digital humanities as it once began with manual analysis of unstructured texts. According to the journal article titled "Visual Text Analysis in Digital Humanities," published in 2017, text analysis provides "applied close and distant reading techniques" through visualization methods.

Unstructured texts are data not formatted in HTML or XML code. It encompasses natural language and regular text. Examples of the unstructured text include blog posts, newspaper articles, books, and journals.

The text analysis process requires:

1. Obtaining a corpus
2. Preparing the text
3. Choosing an analytical tool
4. Inspecting the results

• Google Books Ngram Viewer
• Voyant
• Wordle

Voyant Tutorial Playlist

Examples of TA works:

• How To Do Super Simple Textual Analysis by Aleszu Bajak

A staff member from Storybench follows an example of an in-class drill used by Derek Willis in his data reporting class at Georgetown University.

"Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature" by Matthew Jockers
“Seven Ways Humanists are Using Computers,” by Ted Underwood
 "Visual text analysis in digital humanities." by Jänicke, Stefan, Greta Franzini, Muhammad Faisal Cheema, and Gerik Scheuermann.

If you are assigned a multimedia/new media project for your class or are interested in learning digital tools and methods for your own personal use, schedule a consultation with the Digital Initiatives Librarian on the Digital Initiatives homepage.