Session Title: Text Analytics Overview

Importance of the Topic

Text Analytics are important to any humanities scholars who are interested in increasing the efficiency of their efforts or exploring new research questions that are difficult to do without technology. This session will provide an overview of text analytics including part of speech tagging. We will look at example applications of clustering, frequent pattern analysis and entity extraction. We will also look at the Meandre Server Interface.

Focus of the Topic

Upon completion of this session, participants will understand:

• What Text Analytics can do
• Example text analytics applications that leverage SEASR
• What the Meandre Server Interface is

Format of the Session

• Presentation
• Demonstration
• Learning Exercise
• Discussion Questions
• Summary and Review

Presentation

• Slides can be found at http://dev-tools.seasr.org/confluence/display/Outreach/Presentations

Demonstration

• Meandre Server Interface
  • Tag Cloud Viewer, Text Clustering, Entity Extraction

Learning Exercises

1. Explore Meandre Server Interface
   1. Open browser and point to "http://SERVER:1714/public/services/ping.html"
   2. Explore flows
   3. Execute flows
   4. Tune and execute flows
   5. Other functionality
2. Execute the "Text Clustering" flow on a hard coded web page
   1. Click "flows"
   2. Under "Action", click "run"
3. Execute the "Text Clustering" flow on a webpage of your choice
   1. Click "flows"
   2. Under "Action", click "tune&run"
   3. On the webpage, replace the "http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22925/22925.txt" with a web url of interest to you.

Discussion Questions

• Identify and discuss three other text tools that could be useful in the Humanities?
• What are the obstacles to using this technology for text analysis - what will your colleagues say?

Summary and Review