Textal: a text analysis smartphone app for Digital Humanities

This poster introduces Textal, a text analysis application for iOS, and text analysis service infrastructure, which is currently in development at UCLDH and UCLCASA and will be freely available from Summer 2013. This poster will present findings evaluating the development, launch, and reception of the app, indicating how smartphone technology can increase the potential for public engagement within the Digital Humanities. Textal (soon to be launched at www.textal.org, currently on twitter at @textal) will be a freely available smartphone application which allows users to create, share, and explore word clouds of a document, website, or tweet stream. Those in visualization and Digital Humanities have tended to sneer at the popular use of word clouds (Harris 2011, Meeks 2012), given we are used to applying robust text analysis tools (such as . However, Textal turns word clouds into an intuitive, visually-oriented interface: once a Textal of a chosen text is generated, users can click on words to access underlying statistics, such as frequency and collocates, and so we believe that the pinch, stretch, and click potential in smartphones, along with our judicious design, can fix the elements of word cloud visualization which are currently held to be problematic and act as a bridge between those who have never encountered text analysis techniques, and the more detailed approaches undertaken by researchers in Digital Humanities. All Textal visualizations, including word-clouds, graphs, charts, and word lists, can be shared via social media such as Twitter and Facebook, and the resulting interface word clouds will also be available online. Textal is powered by server-side processing of linguistic data (users can submit any text material they want, by URL, or copy or paste). The resulting sever architecture will also serve as an API for those wishing to carry out on-the-fly generation of text analysis statistics, which can be used in conjunction with other web services. We envision the Textal iPhone, and iPad, app as a fun text-analysis-in-your-pocket product, which can raise the profile of this technique. We have built Textal with the general audience in mind, to bring Digital Humanities approaches to as wide an international audience as possible (we will be translating the interface into many languages). With an increasing move towards smartphone rather than desktop technologies (Tofel 2012) there is a need to understand how mobile technologies fit within the Digital Humanities remit. We believe we are one of the first teams to build, from scratch, a stand-alone app that brings Digital Humanities techniques to a wider, mobile based, audience.