For researchers who work with text

Find a text analysis tool that fits the work.

TAPoR catalogues concordancers, annotators, topic models, stylometry packages, and visualization environments. Every record notes the platform, the license, and what the tool is actually good for.

Type of analysis

Type of license

Web usable

Usage

Platform, license, and method on every record
Reviews from people who teach with the tools
Lists assembled around a course or a corpus

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Visualization

eXist-db

eXist-db is an open source database management system that stores XML data according to the XML data model and features efficient, index-based XQuery processing.

Rated 5.0 out of 5.

Visualization

Gephi

Gephi is a free, open source interactive visualization and data exploration tool. Users can manipulate the display to uncover new facets of the data, enabling intutive exploration.

Rated 5.0 out of 5.

Visualization

Heurist Data Manager / Visualiser / Publisher

HEURIST (http://HeuristNetwork.org) is an extremely flexible, end-user oriented, web-based data management system designed specifically for Humanities data. Developed since 2005, it has been in active use across many projects since 2009. It is available both as a free web service for researchers (hosted at the University of Sydney Data Centre) or for installation on a physical or virtual server (Open Source on gitHub). Researchers can design, create, manage, analyse, visualise and publish their own richly-structured database(s) through a simple web interface, without the need for programmer(s). Quite complex databases can be built in a few hours by borrowing structures and vocabularies published by other users. Databases can be designed and built incrementally, as existing data are not affected by changes in structure. Databases created by Heurist are stored in MySQL with a repeatable structure facilitating sustainability and independent access by other software. Advanced features include record linking, graph structure, drill-down facet searches, rule-based queries, custom reports, linked map-timelines, network visualisation, normalised spreadsheet import, crosstabulation, XML feeds, XSLT transforms. The team provides initial email and skype assistance for project setup at no cost, and special customisations at modest cost. Heurist is applicable in many domains including History, Archaeology, Anthropology, Cultural Research, Linguistics, Media Studies etc. It handles everything from text, tags and categories, through networks of rich relationships and offset annotations, to images, video, spatial data and dating (including non-western systems and dating uncertainty). Sophisticated searches (including faceted and rule-based) can be saved, organised and rendered as layered interactive maps, timelines, network visualisations, crosstabulations, lists, custom reports, XML and XSLT transforms, all of which can easily be printed or embedded (live) in a website - Heurist provides the html code required to embed results in a web page or CMS. Databases can easily be migrated later to a personal or institutional server. Since the data are stored in a standard MySQL database with a fixed and well-documented structure, the data can be accessed directly via SQL from most programming languages independently of Heurist. Version 4.2 (Jan 2016 onwards) is available as a service via the Heurist website. Version 4 delivers a user-customisable interface of widgets, along with better mapping and visualisation. Existing version 3 databases are bidirectionally compatible with version 4.

Rated 5.0 out of 5.

Visualization

KH Coder

KH Coder is a tool for quantitative content analysis and text mining that has been under continuous development since 2001. It was originally developed for Japanese text and now supports numerous other languages, including English, Italian and French. KH Coder also has computational linguistics applications.

Rated 5.0 out of 5.

Visualization

NodeXL

NodeXL is a free, open source tool for generating and exploring network graphs from Microsoft Excel files. It is particularly suited to data from social media sources, and includes the ability to directly import data from Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and email, with additional plugins available for gathering data from Facebook, Microsoft Exchange, wikis and URLs. The tool generates visualizations that can be adjusted, zoomed and filtered, with additional features for vertex grouping, graphing metric calculations, and automating tasks. NodeXL can both import and export data in GraphML, Pajek, UCINet and matrix formats.

Rated 5.0 out of 5.

Visualization

Omeka

Omeka is a content management system designed for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions. Omeka falls at a crossroads of Web Content Management, Collections Management, and Archival Digital Collections Systems. Omeka is designed with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content and interpretation rather than programming. It brings Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to academic and cultural websites to foster user interaction and participation. It makes top-shelf design easy with a simple and flexible templating system. Its robust open-source developer and user communities underwrite Omeka’s stability and sustainability. Omeka allows users to publish cultural heritage objects, extend its functionality with themes and plugins, and curate online exhibits with digital objects.

Rated 5.0 out of 5.

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Analysis

Voyant Tools

Voyant Tools is a web-based reading and analysis environment for digital texts.

Rated 5.0 out of 5.
Natural Language Processing

TUSTEP

TUSTEP (Tubingen System of Text Processing Tools) is a free, open source, widely-used toolbox for text processing. It is aimed at scholarly audiences, can work with texts in both latin and non-latin scripts, and is primarily designed for humanites applications. Its modules include data capture, information retrieval, text collation, text analysis, sorting and ordering, rule-based textual manipulation, data export and typesetting. The user manual is only available in German at this time. This tool has been in continuous development since the 1960s.

Rated 5.0 out of 5.
Visualization

Wordle

Wordle is an online toy for generating word clouds using the text you provide. Text can be submitted by providing an URL or by pasting raw text into an input. The most frequent words from the text are then used as the source for the resulting visualization, where frequency is used to determine the size of each word. You may customize the output by choosing from a variety of display options (layout, font, colours) or use the randomize feature to get a random visualization. Additionally, there is built-in stop word support for many common languages, and the option to change the word case.

Rated 4.0 out of 5.

Geoffrey Rockwell

Cool Voyant Tools

Not all Voyant tools show up in the default view or skin. Here is a list of some of the other tools worth trying.

4 tools

View list

Holly Pickering

Audio Production Software

Interested in audio production and editing? Here are a few programs that can help you get on your way. Some of them are free, some not, but all are helpful and useful.

3 tools

View list

Jason Bradshaw

TATR: Text Analysis for Twitter Research

This list compiles a suite of tools that make up Kynan Ly's Text Analysis for Twitter Research (TATR) Library. Recipes to these notebooks can be found on methodi.ca

6 tools

View list

The catalogue

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Analysis types
671

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eXist-db

Gephi

Heurist Data Manager / Visualiser / Publisher

KH Coder

NodeXL

Omeka

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TUSTEP

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TATR: Text Analysis for Twitter Research

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