Through my thorough research on computational text analysis, the definition I came up with that best describes the term is: a form of research that uses computers to analyze text from digital sources, and turn it into data we can easily understand much faster than we can do it manually. To dive further into this, any time we look at an online text to find deeper meaning we are doing textual analysis. Text analysis is important in many things we do every day as it helps researchers to get their scientific opinions into the world. When we do computational text analysis, we are just using a program on the computer to do the same thing at a much higher speed. This means for more efficient research and faster answers to modern day problems that may need solving.
As a historian, doing research is extremely important in understanding any aspect of history you may need to dig into. In this research, a historian is often looking for information in many primary sources that are filled with information. While some of this information is useful to them, much of it is also not worth their time. Using computational text analysis can help a historian to speed up their research process and filter out information they deem not useful. Without this tool, historians research would move extremely slowly which is not efficient for their work. Thankfully historians have been using computational text analysis to accelerate their work and get information to the public at a much more efficient rate.
Looking at computational text analysis through the Model of Historical Thinking, we can understand the helpfulness of this program even further. For the first aspect of the Model of Historical Thinking, sourcing, computational text analysis can speed up the process of finding the source of the item as it is often listed directly on the digital website it was found on. Doing this for non-digital text is a much slower and harder process.
When we take a look at the next aspect, close reading, computational text analysis can help a researcher to look deeper into their research with the many online tools available. We can highlight, underline, and use many other tools to help our understanding of an online source. It is also very easy to save your documents or other items in folders that are easily accessible and you know are in a safe place.
Looking at the next aspect, contextualizing, we can use computational analysis to understand where and when a certain item is from much faster. As a historian it is important to understand the era something you are looking at is from before doing more research on the article or object. As well as this, when a historian is researching a certain time period, they can easily filter out the sources that are not from the right time.
The final aspect of the Model of Historical Thinking, corroborating, is just as important as any other aspect of the model. Just like these other aspects, computational analysis can be extremely helpful with this task. As a historian, looking through multiple items to ensure you have the correct data is vital to the job. Thankfully being on a computer makes it much easier to switch back and forth from one item to another to easily back check your research.