The aim of Lexos is to create an entry-level environment for Lexomic scholarship, one simple enough to be used easily by the casual student but powerful enough for the advanced professor to use in creating new knowledge and insight. Lexos was created for use with small to medium-sized collections of texts (rather than large text corpora or "big data"), and for use with languages that have non-standard or non Latin-based spelling systems. Most of the early Lexomic research was done on medieval English texts. Doing statistical analysis on texts of these types creates certain challenges, both theoretical and practical, and Lexos developed as a way to explore them.

These issues form part of a wider set of questions we can ask about how computational tools can be used in the Humanities: where are the opportunities, what are the effective practices, and what are the limitations? Our companion documentation, In the Margins, exists not only as a "how to" guide for Lexos, but as a place for putting these questions at the front and center for Lexomic research. In the Margins can be explored directly from its Scalar website, but we also make use of Scalar's Application Programming Interface (API) to embed In the Margins content directly in Lexos. We think it is important that Lexos not become a "black box" into which users feed their texts and from which they obtain results uncritically. By making the discussion part of the tool and the tool part of the discussion, we aim to make Lexos a more rigorous and powerful tool, one in which we can explore more generally the growing impact that quantitative and algorithmic approaches are having on the Humanities.