What we need to learn about text analysis

Here are some questions that could be pursued about text analysis:

• How do people use text analysis tools in reading or studying a book? What informal ways of analyizing a text have emerged, whether in popular culture or the scholarly community?

• What are the expected and broadly understood text analysis fuctions? What types of tools do most scholars understand and how? How do these functions appear in reading environments. For example, we can hypothesize that most scholars understand searching and KWIC displays, but what other analytic functions do scholars understand?

• What could the analytical interface to the book be? What new types of analytical interfaces are emerging? In particular we want to look at visual interfaces to the text and emerging paradigms.

To pursue these questions we imagine the following activities:

• A visual survey of text analysis tools and their interfaces. This would be designed to build a visual thesaurus and a topology of interactive analytical interface elements. This could be coordinated with other groups.

• A survey what sorts of text analysis needs there are in the scholarly community. This would be a online survey followed up possibly by phone interviews. It should try to tease out emerging needs and functions. This should also draw out emerging reading methods independent from tools that can be computer supported. This should be coordinated with the user survey group.

• Prototyping of new analytical interfaces. Working within an interdisciplinary context that includes computational linguists, interface designers, and text analysis tool developers, the project could develop imagined interfaces that respond to activities i and ii. This should be coordinated with the interface group.

-- GeoffreyRockwell - 20 Oct 2006