Textual Analysis and Annotation

ARTFL Text Alignment Tool

Tool that looks for patterns of similar text across various ARTFL (Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language) collections. Useful for examining instances of “direct quotations, plagiarism and other forms of borrowings, commonplace expressions and the like.”

Pros: You can use ARTFL databases specifically established to use the tool to compare select texts; Fully open-source with a GitHub documentation page.

Cons: Learning curve for implementing your own instance of the tool.

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Digital Mappa

Open source digital publishing tool that includes support for multimedia and annotation of texts.

Pros: Open source and browser based.

Cons: Needs to be installed on a server (hosted or your own), which requires some technical knowledge and resources.

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Hypothes.is

Social annotation tool that is created specifically for classroom use. Now supported for integration into Canvas. Alternatively, web version is free, requires Chrome add-on download.

Pros: Free; Integration with Canvas allows for easier grading of student annotations than with Manifold.

Cons: Web version requires creating login and add-on download, use of Chrome browser.

Accessibility: Annotation requires mouse use to highlight text.

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Manifold

Interactive publishing and annotation tool. Manifold is geared more toward publishing works rather than classroom annotation use, but the latter is still possible. Open source but needs to be hosted/installed on a server. Supported by UW Libraries, which has a vendor-hosted instance.

Pros: Can ingest a number of different document and media types, including Google Docs; Faculty can be made users and their students can be added as user groups without requiring added permissions or logins. UW Libraries are happy to provide support for using Manifold and host periodic trainings as well as offer the possibility of one-on-one training.

Cons: Manifold projects can’t be migrated out of or downloaded from the system; they also can’t be migrated from one instance to another (say you got your own server and installed a local instance of Manifold and had a project in the UW Libraries’ instance of Manifold, you couldn’t move the project to your new server – you’d have to rebuild). This is a known issue but a fix is not expected soon.

Accessibility: Highlighting text for annotation and opening the palette tool requires use of the mouse.

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Voyant

Web-based text analysis tool that is comprised of multiple tools for textual analysis and visualization.

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