3.4:Highlighter

AmCAT Version
This page describes a feature in AmCAT 3.4
View other version: 3.3 - 3.4 - 3.5

Highlighters are extremely useful when you or your coders have to code long texts about specific actors or issues. A highlighter makes the process of finding these actors or issues in the text a bit easier by highlighting relevant words in the text as it appears in the annotator.

You create a highlighter in the same way as a codebook. Yes, even though its function is different than that of a codebook, a highlighter is nothing else than a set of labels attached to a codebook, and you create it in the same way.

Let's use an example. The above codebook is a highlighter that highlights the words 'Obama' and 'Cameron' in articles. That way, even when either of these actors is only mentioned in the last paragraph of an article, we can find them easily. To tell AmCAT to use this codebook as a highlighter, first add a label for each code that shows the exact words to highlight, not taking capital letters or accents into account. Here, we added 'cameron' and 'obama' in the language 'en'.

Any language is fine, as long as all labels are in the same language.

Then, open a coding scheme (article- or unitschema both work) that you use for your codings, and click 'Edit properties'.

As you can see, this screen has a field for 'Highlighters' and for 'Highlight language'. Select your highlighter codebook from the list in 'Highlighters', and select the language you used for the highlighter labels, 'en' in our case, from the list under 'Highlight language'. Save your changes.

Now, if you create a codingjob with this coding scheme, and open it in the Annotator, you will see that the words included in the highlighter codebook are highlighted in the annotator for all coding jobs with that scheme.