Introduction
Text analysis is the process of extracting information from a body, or corpus, of texts and organizing it in a meaningful way so that it can serve as the basis for scholarly interpretation.
Pedagogical Possibilities
- Engaging in close reading by encoding the structural and semantic features of texts
- Engaging in distant reading by applying computer-assisted analysis to texts
- Creating digital editions and data visualizations of texts
Texts, Tools, and Examples
For texts, tools, and examples, see the Resources for Text Analysis page of the Resources for Digital Scholarship Research Guide.
Potential Assignments
- Text encoding with the Text Encoding Initiative Standard (group and/or individual) – select text(s) for encoding, develop and document decisions for how the text(s) should be encoded, encode texts according to guidelines, determine online versions of the text(s) should be displayed
- Text mining with Voyant – select text(s) for analysis, clean up the text and upload it to Voyant, determine stopwords (i.e. words that should be excluded from results), experiment with the various tools, write up experience
For more information about text analysis and its use in the classroom, contact the Digital Scholarship team in the libraries.