CHAPTER 1 - Text Analysis

Saving a document in "text" format

You must save the documents in the text format: Microsoft Word files, ANSI (Windows), HTML (web pages), RTF, or other. These documents must have a text file extension (myfile.doc, WebPage.htm, etc.) Limitations may exist for some of these formats. Consult the software user's manual for further details.

We recommend that you save your texts in the [Text only] or web page format (HTML). To carry out a file conversion, use the [Text only] option of the [Save as] command of your word processor. You can save web pages on your hard drive by means of your web browser or of a "web-spider".

The text may include punctuation marks, capitals or special characters (such as parentheses, numbers, percentages, etc.) Only alphabet letters and punctuation characters will be used during the analysis. If you want a series of words to be considered as a single word, link these words together with the underline character "_" (for instance: head_of_government).

To get better results, use punctuation and respect the typographical conventions in use in English. The spellchecker of some word processors can enable you to ensure that these conventions are fully respected.

Starting a text analysis

To analyze a text, start Tropes, use the [File][Open] command, select a file, and click on [OK].

It is also possible to use the drag & drop function of Windows Explorer: grab a text with the mouse and drop it on the main window of Tropes.

Examining the text

As an introduction to the software, we suggest the analysis of the example file: Jfk11.txt.

Once a text is opened, and as soon as the analysis is over, its content is displayed, split into propositions:

The main analysis results are displayed inside the frames on the left of the screen, while the text and the graphs are shown on the right.

This window “responds” according to the text:

- When the mouse cursor is placed on a word of the text, the message bar at the bottom of the screen shows the category of this word (in the above example, this word is a “substantive”). In this case, the [nn/ww] indicator on the left of the message bar indicates the occurrence number of the word pointed at by the mouse.

- When the display applies to a subset of the text, only the categories concerned appear in color. To display the whole text, use the [Show][All the text] command or the [All] button  of the tool bar:

Displaying the context of a proposition

To display the context of a proposition, click on the icons on the left margin of the text results, or point at any word, then press the right button of the mouse, and select the [Context] command in the context menu.

The display of the context is similar to that of the main window (syntactic coloring of words, etc.)

This tool proves useful when the display applies to a specific part of the text (i.e. when all the propositions are not displayed). It can also be used to store temporarily a passage of particular interest to you.

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