Introduction to Text Analysis With Voyeur Tools

Introduction to Text Analysis With Voyeur Tools
Sinclair, Stéfan, McMaster University, sgsinclair@gmail.com
Rockwell, Geoffrey , University of Alberta, geoffrey.rockwell@ualberta.ca
Description
Are you interested in using computing methods to analyze electronic texts? Geoffrey Rockwell (University of Alberta) and Stéfan Sinclair (McMaster University) will run a hands-on workshop on using the web-based Voyeur Tools text analysis environment (voyeurtools.org). Participants can follow along with example documents or use their own. Voyeur Tools is the latest text analysis web-based system developed by TAPoR collaborators and it brings together visualization and concording tools in a fashion that allows multipanel interactive analysis or single tool analysis. Voyeur Tools runs on a high performance computing cluster and is capable of scaling to handle multiple documents and larger texts than previous web based tools.

The workshop will provide:

An introduction to basic text analysis concepts and techniques (independent of the tool set being used)
An introduction to different ways of using Voyeur Tools. Voyeur can be used in a multi-panel view where the different tools interact or as individual tools. Users will be shown different ways of running Voyeur Tools and how to manage panels.
Understanding the Voyeur display. Voyeur provides a number of different panels with information from a summary of the corpus to distribution graphs. Participants will be taken through the different panels and the capabilities of each one.
Using Voyeur Recipes for analysis. Participants will be introduced to the Voyeur Recipes, which are tutorials on how to use Voyeur for research tasks. We will start by looking at how Voyeur can be used to explore a theme through a text. We will then look at using Voyeur for diachronic study of a collection of documents over time.
Quoting Voyeur results. Users will be introduced to Voyeur's ability to produce HTML fragments that can be used to quote results in other online documents. With Voyeur you can export your results in various ways, one of which is placing live panels into blogs or wikis.
Integrating Voyeur into remote sites. We have developed specialized plugins that integrate with frameworks such as WordPress, Drupal and OJS. Participants will learn about these as well as how to integrate Voyeur into almost any site with a generic plugin module.
Instructors
Stéfan Sinclair is an Associate Professor of Multimedia. His areas of interest include computer-assisted literary text analysis, experimental visualization interfaces, and 20th Century French literature (especially Oulipo). He is the creator or co-developer of online Digital Humanities tools such as Voyeur Tools, the TAPoR Portal, the Humanities Visualization Project.

Geoffrey Rockwell is a Professor of Philosophy and Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta, Canada. He has published and presented papers in the area of philosophical dialogue, textual visualization and analysis, humanities computing, instructional technology, computer games and multimedia.