Introduction to Text Analysis
Text analysis is the computational study of written materials. This guide covers the fundamental concepts and tools.
What is Text Analysis?
Text analysis (also called text mining) uses computational methods to extract meaningful patterns from text. For humanities scholars, this means:
- Distant reading — Analyzing patterns across thousands of documents
- Named entity recognition — Automatically identifying people, places, and organizations
- Topic modeling — Discovering hidden themes in large document collections
Key Concepts
Tokenization
Breaking text into smaller units (words, sentences, or phrases) for analysis.
Frequency Analysis
Counting how often words or phrases appear. Simple but powerful for understanding text patterns.
N-grams
Sequences of N consecutive words. Useful for finding phrases and collocations.
Tools We'll Cover
- Python + spaCy — Industry-standard NLP library
- Voyant Tools — Web-based text analysis (no coding required)
- Claude AI — For quick analysis and pattern recognition
More text analysis guides coming soon.