Texts of all kinds are fundamental in the study of many disciplines, and much effort has been devoted to creating reliable, accurate and readable versions of texts, both in print and in the digital world. Editions of texts that are published online can have much greater interactivity, and can often be searched and displayed in new ways, opening up the study of text through computer analysis, or showing features of the text not easily displayed in traditional print editions.
To discover what text analysis tools can do to reveal information from groups of text, you should begin by looking at Voyant Tools. Loading one of the predefined sets of texts (corpora) will produce basic statistics on word counts, word contexts (collocations), word trends across documents, and other useful metrics, giving you a starting point to explore texts in new ways.
A key tool in the use of digital text is the transcription language called TEI. Using this will ensure texts that you create for analysis are standardised and can be exchanged readily with other researchers; there are a number of repositories of freely available texts that can be downloaded for analysis.
Creating digital texts, whether of historical documents, literary works, or even documentation and manuals, will benefit from the standardisation of text formats, and allows the processing of texts into multiple outputs, editions or visualisations. The practice of digital editing and production of digital editions is well documented.
Digital Scholarly Editing by
This volume presents the state of the art in digital scholarly editing. Drawing together the work of established and emerging researchers, it gives pause at a crucial moment in the history of technology in order to offer a sustained reflection on the practices involved in producing, editing and reading digital scholarly editions--and the theories that underpin them. The unrelenting progress of computer technology has changed the nature of textual scholarship at the most fundamental level: the way editors and scholars work, the tools they use to do such work and the research questions they attempt to answer have all been affected. Each of the essays in Digital Scholarly Editing approaches these changes with a different methodological consideration in mind. Together, they make a compelling case for re-evaluating the foundation of the discipline--one that tests its assertions against manuscripts and printed works from across literary history, and the globe. The sheer breadth of Digital Scholarly Editing, along with its successful integration of theory and practice, help redefine a rapidly-changing field, as its firm grounding and future-looking ambit ensure the work will be an indispensable starting point for further scholarship. This collection is essential reading for editors, scholars, students and readers who are invested in the future of textual scholarship and the digital humanities.
Digital Critical Editions by
Provocative yet sober, Digital Critical Editions examines how transitioning from print to a digital milieu deeply affects how scholars deal with the work of editing critical texts. On one hand, forces like changing technology and evolving reader expectations lead to the development of specific editorial products, while on the other hand, they threaten traditional forms of knowledge and methods of textual scholarship. Using the experiences of philologists, text critics, text encoders, scientific editors, and media analysts, Digital Critical Editions ranges from philology in ancient Alexandria to the vision of user-supported online critical editing, from peer-directed texts distributed to a few to community-edited products shaped by the many. The authors discuss the production and accessibility of documents, the emergence of tools used in scholarly work, new editing regimes, and how the readers' expectations evolve as they navigate digital texts. The goal: exploring questions such as, What kind of text is produced? Why is it produced in this particular way? Digital Critical Editions provides digital editors, researchers, readers, and technological actors with insights for addressing disruptions that arise from the clash of traditional and digital cultures, while also offering a practical roadmap for processing traditional texts and collections with today's state-of-the-art editing and research techniques thus addressing readers' new emerging reading habits.
Note that many individual research projects have their own encoding guidelines, but these will contain customisations or use a reduced set of tags, so may not give a complete understanding of TEI.
Digital editions vary widely in scope and approach, and if you are learning digital editing or creating your own edition, it is worthwhile examining other editions outside your specific field of interest. The links below give some examples of innovative and well-designed editions, as well as catalogues of editions available to the public.
Analysing language to understand its structure, features, style and authorship can be achieved using a number of tools, and was one of the earliest examples of the use of computers in humanities research, with the work of Fr. Roberto Busa in the late 1940s. Modern techniques used in corpus linguistics, text mining, document categorisation and cluster analysis can give insight into the content and structure of texts.
Natural Language Processing with Python by 
Cluster Analysis for Corpus Linguistics by
The standard scientific methodology in linguistics is empirical testing of falsifiable hypotheses. As such the process of hypothesis generation is central, and involves formulation of a research question about a domain of interest and statement of a hypothesis relative to it. In corpus linguistics the domain is text, and generation involves abstraction of data from text, data analysis, and formulation of a hypothesis based on inference from the results. Traditionally this process has been paper-based, but the advent of electronic text has increasingly rendered it obsolete both because the size of digital corpora is now at or beyond the limit of what can efficiently be used in the traditional way, and because the complexity of data abstracted from them can be impenetrable to understanding. Linguists are increasingly turning to mathematical and statistical computational methods for help, and cluster analysis is such a method. It is used across the sciences for hypothesis generation by identification of structure in data which are too large or complex, or both, to be interpretable by direct inspection. This book aims to show how cluster analysis can be used for hypothesis generation in corpus linguistics, thereby contributing to a quantitative empirical methodology for the discipline.
Digital Publishing is, in essence, the replacement of print format with a digital variant, of which there are no formal boundaries. As long as it exists in code, everything from the text message to the weekly blog can be considered an example of Digital Publishing. It offers methods and scales of distribution made logistically impossible by the limitations of traditional print media, and carries with it the potential for exponential levels of consumption, due to the inherently collaborative modes that define the contemporary experience of accessing digital media. A single person is able to share the material at no extra cost with their friends and followers, who in turn might share it too, all the while endlessly producing reproductions of the original.
Digital Publishing is unique in that, at least with the majority of its variants, it is endlessly malleable. It contains within itself the potential to be altered at the click of a button, by writer and consumer alike, as well as, in the PDF format for example, alternatively offering a security of sorts for those concerned with the preservation of authorial sanctity offered by print. As well as being beneficial in regards to the act of publishing itself, digitized versions of published material go beyond the constraints of their physical counterparts, insofar as their foundational coding offers a vastly deeper experience of consumption, whether that be through the use of hyperlinking, embedded video, instantaneous translation, real-time updates; the benefits of Digital Publishing over Physical Publishing are substantial, and ever changing.
Paper Knowledge by
Paper Knowledge is a remarkable book about the mundane: the library card, the promissory note, the movie ticket, the PDF (Portable Document Format). It is a media history of the document. Drawing examples from the 1870s, the 1930s, the 1960s, and today, Lisa Gitelman thinks across the media that the document form has come to inhabit over the last 150 years, including letterpress printing, typing and carbon paper, mimeograph, microfilm, offset printing, photocopying, and scanning. Whether examining late nineteenth century commercial, or "job" printing, or the Xerox machine and the role of reproduction in our understanding of the document, Gitelman reveals a keen eye for vernacular uses of technology. She tells nuanced, anecdote-filled stories of the waning of old technologies and the emergence of new. Along the way, she discusses documentary matters such as the relation between twentieth-century technological innovation and the management of paper, and the interdependence of computer programming and documentation. Paper Knowledge is destined to set a new agenda for media studies.
There are a wide range of corpora (collections of texts) available for search, download or reuse as the subject of textual analysis. They vary from simple plain-text archives, such as Project Gutenberg, to complex, heavily marked-up corpora such as the British National Corpus.
For many applications in textual analysis, it is essential to have texts that are marked up systematically and consistently, and that have been reliably edited, usually with the involvement of an editorial team to ensure that errors are not missed by a single editor's oversights.
To find out more about the basic structure of TEI and how to get started encoding your own text, visit our TEI page.
