Introduction to Text Analysis Using JiTR and Voyeur

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 JiTR collections management tool to
do text analysis environment on electronic texts
with Voyeur. JiTR (http://ra.tapor.ualberta.c
a/~jitr), which stands for Just in Time Research
is a platform for managing collections of texts
which can launch text analysis tools like Voyeur.
Voyeur 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 is capable of scaling
to handle multiple documents and larger texts than
previous web based tools.
The workshop will provide
An introduction to managing texts with JiTR for
analysis. This will include ways of aggregating texts
for analysis and how to manage the tools you use in
JiTR, especially Voyeur.
1. An introduction to different ways of using Voyeur.
Voyeur can be used in a multi-panel view where the
different views interact (see screen shot below) or
as individual tools. Users will be shown different
ways of running Voyeur and how to manage panels.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
Participants are encouraged to bring their own
documents on a Flash Drive for the workshop.
Half-day workshop: Morning 7 July