UCL Digital Humanities launch text analysis app

A free smartphone app that allows people to explore the relationships between words in text via an intuitive interface was launched by academics at UCL this week. Designed by a team from UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH) and the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), the app allows the visualisation of any text from politicians' speeches, to academic papers and newspaper articles, enabling people to unearth the themes and hidden uses of language within text through the generation of graphics and statistics. Professor Melissa Terras, Director of UCLDH, said: "Textal is a fun and useful tool for research and play. We like to think of it as a gateway into digital humanities, providing text analysis in your pocket. It's a public engagement tool, bringing a traditional digital humanities technique to the masses. It also helps explain what we do in digital humanities in a handy, free smartphone app." Text analysis is a powerful technique that has been around since the very first computers were built, yet is still not very well-known. This is something the team hope will change with the launch of the app.