Hey, Literature Majors...some help here?

[Iolaus]

In my critical reasoning class, the prof has something he calls "The Method" for analyzing a text, part of which involves counting how many time words are used in a text, which can get really tedious. Is there some site or program I can use that I can just plug a text into, and have it count and rank the words automatically? It seems like a brainless task like that could be done easily by a computer, and since he claims that this is a common technique, I would bet someone's written such a program already.

[clancelt]

I don't know how the windows guys do it, but the Unix guys would do something like this:

"cat thedocument.txt | grep -c theword"

this would give you the count of how many times the text "theword" shows up.

I could write a script that would set up an array of the unique words in the document and then run that with each word variable then dump the results to a text file.

I'm sure the Windows guys have something that will do the same thing with one or two clicks. :rolleyes:

[Nick]

If you're doing things like Shakespeare or the Bible, there are published concordances that you can use. I don't know how many works have accompanying concordances, though.

[Iolaus]

This class uses a variety of poems and short stories. The poems are fairly easy, but for the stories... I pasted a 4 page story into Word, and used the word search on each word seperately, while at the same time deleting the highlighted results ...it took hours!! ...and I still had to visually search the text for binaries (opposites) and word strands (words with related meanings).

I was just hoping that there would be a site online that would do the word count on anything you pluged into it.

...and yes, I'm using Windows.

If you're doing things like Shakespeare or the Bible, there are published concordances that you can use. I don't know how many works have accompanying concordances, though.

I'm taking a Shakespeare class from the same Prof. I'll keep that in mind if he decides to torture us there too, but I doubt he will. We're only giving two weeks to each play (one night class a week), so we're moving too fast to do any real in-depth analyzing.

[clancelt]

Always try to help my Windows using brothers

How does this sound:

Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) is a text analysis software program designed by James W. Pennebaker, Roger J. Booth, and Martha E. Francis. LIWC is able to calculate the degree to which people use different categories of words across a wide array of texts. Within emails, speeches, poems, or transcribed daily speech, LIWC allows you to determine the rate at which the authors/speakers use positive or negative emotion words, self-references, big words, or words that refer to sex, eating, or religion. The program was designed to analyze simply and quickly over 70 dimensions of language across hundreds of text samples in seconds.

Doesn't cost too much either, looks like a cool tool either way.

Link

[clancelt]

P.S. I think it does do word count per word.

[Iolaus]

Always try to help my Windows using brothers

How does this sound:

Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) is a text analysis software program designed by James W. Pennebaker, Roger J. Booth, and Martha E. Francis. LIWC is able to calculate the degree to which people use different categories of words across a wide array of texts. Within emails, speeches, poems, or transcribed daily speech, LIWC allows you to determine the rate at which the authors/speakers use positive or negative emotion words, self-references, big words, or words that refer to sex, eating, or religion. The program was designed to analyze simply and quickly over 70 dimensions of language across hundreds of text samples in seconds.

Doesn't cost too much either, looks like a cool tool either way.

Link

You're right, looks like an interesting tool, but I finally found this to use for free on-line. It does exactly what I wanted.

[walkerk]

I don't know how the windows guys do it, but the Unix guys would do something like this:

"cat thedocument.txt | grep -c theword"

this would give you the count of how many times the text "theword" shows up.

I could write a script that would set up an array of the unique words in the document and then run that with each word variable then dump the results to a text file.

I'm sure the Windows guys have something that will do the same thing with one or two clicks. :rolleyes:

Even better would be:

tr -sc 'A-Za-z' '\012' <file.txt | sort | uniq -ci | sort -rn | more

[Andrew Breecher]

In my critical reasoning class, the prof has something he calls "The Method" for analyzing a text, part of which involves counting how many time words are used in a text

What an amazing way to take a great work of literature and reduce it to nonsensical numbers!

;)

Seriously, though, I have a feeling if most authors knew how their texts were picked apart in classes they'd roll over in their graves and say, "I just liked the way that sounded," or "I don't know what I was thinking, I just wrote it and it turned out well." Don't get me wrong, I love literature, and I love how it makes me feel, but there's such a thing as overanalysis. It's only literature. It's made to be enjoyed, not tedium.

Andrew.

[Nick]

What an amazing way to take a great work of literature and reduce it to nonsensical numbers!

But...but...didn't you know numerical quantification is the only way to tell if something has any merit or value????

Nick -with tounge firmly in cheek.