This page links to a variety of text analysis tools and information on how they might be used in the classroom. Much of the content on this page is adapted from Dr. Chris Wells' (Macalester College) presentation at a workshop: Fostering the Digital Humanities at St. Thomas, June 2015.
(Image credit: Annotation Studio,
http://www.annotationstudio.org/)
There are countless sources of full-text books; included here are but a handful. You might also search UST's extensive ebook holdings. Also, journal articles or dissertations might also be sources for text analysis.
JSTOR is an archiving service and search platform for thousands of academic journals, newspapers, and ebooks, to which the library subscribes. Constellate is a platform they have created to allow for text mining analysis of items in the JSTOR corpus. Full Constellate access is a subscription service, to which we do not subscribe, but they have made available a free tier of service that allows you to create and analyze datasets.
Hathi Trust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection. The University of St. Thomas is not a member of Hathi Trust, so we only have access to digitized items in the public domain, but this is still a huge collection.
The Research Center offers tools that allow researchers to query and interact with data from the HathiTrust Library. The Center is breaking new ground in the areas of text mining and non-consumptive research, allowing scholars to use HathiTrust content while preventing intellectual property misuse within the confines of current U.S. copyright law
Distant Reading by In the ten essays collected in this volume, Franco Moretti reconstructs the intellectual trajectory of his philosophy of ‘distant reading’. From the evolutionary model of ‘Modern European Literature’, through the geo-cultural dominant of ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ and ‘Planet Hollywood’ to the quantitative findings of ‘Style, inc.’ and the abstract patterns of ‘Network Theory, Plot Analysis’, the book follows two decades of critical explorations that have come to define – well beyond the wildest expectations of its author – a growing field of unorthodox literary studies.
Macroanalysis: digital methods and literary history by In this volume, Matthew L. Jockers introduces readers to large-scale literary computing and the revolutionary potential of macroanalysis--a new approach to the study of the literary record designed for probing the digital-textual world as it exists today, in digital form and in large quantities. Using computational analysis to retrieve key words, phrases, and linguistic patterns across thousands of texts in digital libraries, researchers can draw conclusions based on quantifiable evidence regarding how literary trends are employed over time, across periods, within regions, or within demographic groups, as well as how cultural, historical, and societal linkages may bind individual authors, texts, and genres into an aggregate literary culture.