This session focuses on the kinds of textual analysis that are possible using concordances, collocates, measures of distinctiveness (e.g., tf-idf) and other tools of style or content analysis based on the characteristics of tokens (words) within documents relative to general characteristics of a corpus.  We will look at how these techniques have been used in research (e.g., Mendenhall's early work on Shakespeare, Morton's stylometric study of the Pauline epistles, Mosteller and Wallace's analysis of the Federalist Papers, and Foster's examination of the novel Primary Colors).

Learning Outcomes: Participants will learn how to undertake some basic types of automated textual analysis using, e.g., metrics of document similarity.  Sample projects will illustrate the range of approaches and suggest the domains of relevant research questions.