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Main > TourPortal > TAPoR > TaporRecipes > RecipeFourOhOne



Compare Two Texts


This is a recipe to compare different texts

Ingredients

wrench.gif This recipe is applied to speeches by Obama and Wright in Now, Analyze That

Steps

  1. Make sure your texts are in the same format. This recipe assumes they are Plain Text Files, though there are comparable tools to handle HTML and XML.
  2. Use the Comparator to compare your two texts. The comparator will show you the vocabulary which is common sorted by the ratio of relative frequency. This means words common to both texts, but far more frequent in text 1 appear first down to those more frequent in text two.
  3. Try to see if there are themes to the words that appear more frequently in one text over the other. You can explore these themes by using the following tools:
    • The Concordance tool can be used to search for a word to see its context. You can compare KWIC concordances from the different texts of the same word or phrase.
    • The Collocation tool will let you see what words collocate with the words you are exploring. If you compare the collocates for the same word from different texts you can get a sense of the differences in how the word is used.
    • The List Word Pairs tool will let you see frequently used phrases of two words in each of the texts. These again can be compared.

Discussion

One way to think of comparing is that you are trying to find the common themes or clusters of words with the TAPoRware Comparator and then you are follow the themes seperately through each text and compare how they play out. See Explore Themes within a Text recipe.

You can use the TAPOR Portal instead of the TAPoRware tools listed here if you want to track your results. The portal lets you also save aggregations of more than one text so you can have a text that combines the two you are comparing. Note, however, that some of the experimental tools in TAPoRware are not in the portal.

Glossary

KWIC
A Key Word In Context (or KWIC) is a display of results in which the word searched for, the keyword, is in the centre surrounded by one line of context. This is how concordances are usually displayed. Here is an example that shows the occurrences of the word "dream" in A Midsummer Night's Dream in TACTweb: 
I.1/577.1        | Four nights will quickly dream away the time; | And
I.1/578.2   Swift as a shadow, short as any dream; | Brief as the
II.2/585.1        | Ay me, for pity! what a dream was here! | Lysander,
III.2/591.1    this derision | Shall seem a dream and fruitless vision, |
IV.1/593.1      as the fierce vexation of a dream. | But first I will
IV.1/594.2    to me | That yet we sleep, we dream. Do not you think | The
IV.1/594.2      rare | vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to
IV.1/594.2     the wit of man to | say what dream it was: man is but an
IV.1/594.2    he go | about to expound this dream. Methought I was--there
IV.1/594.2     his heart to report, what my dream | was. I will get Peter
IV.1/594.2      to write a ballad of | this dream: it shall be called
IV.1/594.2      it shall be called Bottom's dream, | because it hath no
V.1/599.1       | Following darkness like a dream, | Now are frolic: not a
V.1/599.2   theme, | No more yielding but a dream, | Gentles, do not

Collocation
Collocation refers to the occurrence of words adjacently more often than would be expected by chance.

A Complete Glossary

Next Steps/Further Information

-- GeoffreyRockwell - 02 Jan 2007

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