The blog Digital Inspiration has done some recent posts on automated text analysis tools. These tools allow the analyst to do simple word frequency counts and gather other statistics from documents. If you looked at Rachel Kesselman's thesis on word usage in historical NIEs, you know that you can get some pretty sophisticated results from these tools. Here are a couple that would be useful for some fast and simple analytic tasks.
Text Content Analysis Tool
Wordle (If you need to make the analysis visually appealling)
If I were going to use this in a classroom exercise, I would try to get two different speeches from the same person to compare. For example, I had one student use these types of tools to analyze the kinds of words Vladimir Putin used to talk about similar topics to his domestic audience and to the international community. Very interesting stuff!
Also see this neat service:
ReplyDeletehttp://services.disruptiveproactivity.com/heattheme/
I just downloaded Firefox 3 and it promptly lost 60% of my bookmarks. Good thing I recently exported them to a separate file.
ReplyDeleteBTW, I just tagged you with the Randomness Meme over at IntelFusion, Kris. :-)