Rebecca Benefiel presented and talked about using tools for data analysis that would be useful for businesses, social media, and email communications. Rebecca said that when you analyze text, which approaches do you use depends on what is the focus of your research. Specifically, for social research your often confronted with a lot of language material. In essence, when you do the analysis with one of the tools you focus on detailed analysis of text. Some of the uses of text analysis tools that were mentioned and briefly explained are:

• Social network analysis
• Geo-spatial/mapping
• Distance reading/content analysis
• Visual/sound analysis
• Visualization

Also, Rebecca mentioned Gephi; another tool platform, which is used for data analysts and scientists keen to explore and understand graphs. A tool in which “the user interacts with the representation, manipulate the structures, shapes and colors to reveal hidden patterns”.

Some of the tools for text analysis mentioned are:

• Dirt Directory (dirtdirectory.org)

• Voyant (voyant-tools.org) for text analysis

• Open Refine (openrefine.org)

• Programming Historian

AND Notes from Neil on the same workshop  Tool Sharing w/ Rebecca (Text Analysis

• Easier to learn by example
• Types of digital tools
  • Text analysis
  • Social network analysis
  • Geo-spatial/mapping
  • Distance reading/content analysis
  • Visual/sound analysis
  • Visualization
• Voyant tools demonstration
  • Allows people to replicate your analysis about the data set
  • Open source
  • Many tool options
  • Helpful community
  • Ability to filter out words in data, while maintaining full original text
  • Can increase tool window size (term #)
  • How to get Twitter text?
    • “tags” – allows you to collect data every minute from Twitter
  • The Programming Historian
    • Used to ask and answer humanities quetsions
    • Well-written tutorials
  • Open Refine
    • Helpful explanation video on Youtube
  • Text grid
    • Software for download (open-sourced)
    • Search image (create hyperlink)
  • org
    • Visualizing networks
    • Viewing group clusters
  • Palladio
    • Limited in showing statistical importance of people in a social netowrk
  • Node Excel
  • Omeka
    • Good for images, video, sound