The University College London (UCL) Centre for Digital Humanities, in collaboration with the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, has released Textal. Textal is a free iOS app “that allows users to analyze documents, web pages and tweet streams, exploring the relationships between words in the text via an intuitive word cloud interface. The app generates visualizations and statics that can be shared without effort, which makes it a fun and useful tool for both research and play, bridging the gap between text analysis and mobile computing. We also see it as a public engagement activity for Digital Humanities.”
Tag: text analysis
DIGITAL PROJECT: Lincoln Logarithms: Finding Meaning in Sermons
Lincoln Logarithms, a new project from the Digital Scholarship Commons at Emory University, uses four text analysis tools, MALLET, Voyant, Paper Machines, and Viewshare, to examine 57 full text sermons given on the occasion of Lincoln’s assassination. Interesting enough in its own right, the project also explicitly addresses some the major obstacles in DH projects:
- Can digital tools always make our research more innovative–or sometimes, do they just get in the way?
- Would the digital programs offer new insights and save us time? Or would they clutter up an otherwise straighforward textual analysis?
- Digital tools can help us hone in on what questions to ask. They are a way to help us arrive at questions and results, but they aren’t results.