Step 2: What is Text Analysis?

Text analysis begins with a research question or curiosity and involves the use of digital tools and one’s own analytical skills to explore texts, be they literary works, historical documents, journal articles, legal briefs, transcribed interviews, or tweets, and is used in a wide variety of disciplines. Approaches can be quantitative and qualitative, and tools can range from coding and scripting languages to "out of the box" platforms like Voyant and Lexos.

Associated Terms

Text mining (a term used more in the humanities), data mining (a term used more in the sciences and social sciences), and web scraping are techniques that use coding, scripting, and "out of the box" tools to gather text and create a corpus (or dataset).