Matthew L. Jockers

“TAToo” is a fun Flash widget developed by Peter Organisciak at the University of Alberta. Peter works under the supervision of Digital Humanists Par Excellence and TAPoR Gurus Geoffrey Rockwell and Stan Ruecker. The widget (just some embed-able code) does “layman’s” text analysis on the web pages in which its code is embedded. I’ve added the code to the right sidebar of my blog to take it for a test drive.

The tool offers several “views” of your text. The default view is a word cloud in which words with greater frequency are both larger and more bold. Looking at the word cloud can give you a pretty quick sense of the page’s key terms and concepts.

By clicking on the “Tool:” bar at the top of the widget, you can select other options. The “List Words” view provides a term frequency list. You can then click on any word in the list to see its collocates. Alternatively, there are both a Collocate view and a Concordance view that allow users to enter a specific word and get information about the company that word keeps.

Kudos to Peter and the rest of the TAPoR Tools team for continuing to pursue the fine art of tool making.