In the Margins Main Menu Welcome The In the Margins home page Lexomics The starting point for the Lexomics path Manual Start page for the Lexos Manual Topics Explore this path to learn about the Lexomic methods Glossary Glossary of terms used in Lexos and In the Margins Bibliography Beginning of bibliography path Lexos Install Guide Install Guide

The Lexos Workflow

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Lexos is an integrated workflow of tools to facilitate the computational analysis of digitized texts. Lexos highlights the small but important steps involved when preprocessing and preparing texts for analysis by making the decisions explicit in the tool's interface. Feel free to walk through the workflow paths below or jump around. The Lexos tools themselves also link back into appropriate places of the discussion on effective practices of the steps in the workflow.
 
For more specific information, click the highlighted links. 
 
In the Margins is our attempt to position the process of computational literary text analysis side by side with its product, whether it be the tool used for or the results obtained from such analysis. This is particularly important for entry-level users and those whose training has not explored the issues raised by computational methods of studying literature. Lexos is designed for use by newcomers to the field while empowering them to do sophisticated work in relatively little time. 

The Lexos Workflow is a series of steps you make when working with files and corpora of digitized texts. 
 
Speed Tour:
Import files by using the Upload Tool, then use the Manage Tool to select the documents that will be active for subsequent operations. To prepare the documents, Scrub the selected documents to remove punctuation, but maybe leave internal apostrophes. Next Cut a document by dividing it into different segments. Finally, Visualize results as word and topic clouds, download matrix files of word counts for use with other tools, or Analyze subsets of your document and document segments by varying the metrics: the number of top-most words, the n-gram type, and the culling options. For example, produce a dendrogram from a hierarchical cluster analysis using the Euclidean Distance metric with Average Linkage on the top-100, 1-gram word counts in segments of two Middle English poems.

The Lexos suite of tools is divided into several sections which appear as drop-down menus in the interface of the website: Upload, Manage, Prepare, Visualize, and Analyze. Each section contains tools used in Lexomic methods of linguistic research. While many of your choices will be the same from analysis to analysis, each choice enables a conscious consideration of the option itself, for example, 'Do I really want to remove all the punctuation?' (c.f., Hoover, 2015) or 'If I cut up my document, how many segments should I make and how small is too small for a reasonable segment size?'

The following sections will introduce you to the various facets of each step in the workflow.

This page has paths:

  1. The Lexos workflow Mark D. LeBlanc