Workshop 7

Introduction to Text Analysis Using JiTR and Voyeur  

**Registration for this workshop is now closed**

Stéfan Sinclair (McMaster University), Geoffrey Rockwell (Univ of Alberta)

Half-day workshop, Morning, 7 July

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 (ra.tapor.ualberta.ca/~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.