Research Tools for Students

Text Analysis for Writing Students

For students in my writing courses, you may want to conduct some analysis of the texts you are using for your projects. To do so, there are several ready-made tools that can help you with the analysis.

If you are collecting your own texts to analyze

One popular way to analyze texts is to use a concordancer, that will allow you to search for Key Words in Context, see word lists by frequency, and see collocations. A useful (and free) concordancer is Antconc, created by Lawrence Anthony. The Compleat Lexical Tutor – if you want a quick analysis of the vocabulary in a text.

Lawrence Anthony’s website – software like AntConc and AntWordProfiler.

Web-based corpora

If you want to analyze texts or language use already out there in the universe, there are several web-based tools that allows you to analyze existing data sets. Here are a few useful

Corpus of Contemporary American English
The Spoken British National Corpus
Corpus of Historical American English – if you want to see how language changes over time.
SACODEYL – A corpus of different European languages with transcripts and video. The website seems to be abandoned, but most of the materials still work.
MICASE – Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English
MICUSP – Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers
Trump Twitter Archive – Searchable database of all of Trump’s Tweets (and several other related Twitter accounts)
Wikipedia Corpus – quickly create your own corpus of Wikipedia articles on related topics.

Alternative places to get language data

The Internet Archive is a valuable repository for classic literature, pop literature, music, and other media that are out of copyright.
TED talks – Video and transcripts of high-interest presentations by recognized experts.
New South Voices - Interviews from people in the Southeast (especially in the Charlotte area)

Guide for Research Assistants

If you are interested in more in-depth studies of textual features, please contact me and we can talk about options for research projects. If you are interested in pursuing a more formal research project, I recommend that you look into the undergraduate research programs at Wake Forest (especially URECA and URECA-X).