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AmCAT Navigator

The Amsterdam Content Analysis Toolkit (AmCAT) is a free open source infrastructure that makes it easy to conduct large-scale automatic and manual content analysis (text analysis) for the social sciences and humanities.

AmCAT aims to make manual and automatic content analysis of various types of texts more easy and accessible. AmCAT improves the use and the standard of content analysis in the social sciences and humanities, and stimulates the sharing of data and analyses.

The AmCAT system was designed to make it easier to manage (large) content analysis projects. Documents being one of the essential ingredients, an essential aspect of AmCAT is the storing, viewing, and managing of documents from various sources. The data are stored in a standard database, to which every user has access for his/her own projects. The source code for the scripts and website are open source, so everyone is free to setup his/her own server. The system is designed to make it easy to integrate new analyses, through the website, web services, or through direct access. AmCAT is designed as an open system, herewith encouraging users to contribute to AmCAT. The AmCAT designers have tried to make it easy to add functionality, such as upload or scrape scripts or analyses, by using as open standards where applicable and by using a plugin-structure in the places where they expect extensions to be useful.

This wiki provides a beginner's guide to AmCAT.

To do: Het principe van AmCAT in een paar zinnen vatten (ter vervanging van de derde alinea hierboven "The AmCAT system ... - ... to be useful").

Getting started with AmCAT

Figure 1.1 AmCAT Navigator Login Screen

An AmCAT project starts in the AmCAT Navigator (see Figure 1.1). You can log in at the AmCAT Navigator using your browser (e.g., Firefox, Google Chrome or Internet Explorer). Go to https://amcat.nl and log in to AmCAT. In order to be able to log in, you need to create an Account.

Figure 1.2 AmCAT Navigator Example Article Set

Logging in brings you to the AmCAT home page, where you click on the blue 'Manage Projects' button to go to the location where your AmCAT projects are stored. These can be your own project or the projects of other AmCAT users that allow you to have a guest role. If you want to start a new AmCAT project, the first step is Creating an AmCAT project and adding articles to this project. However, when the AmCAT project has already been created, you select the relevant project by clicking on the project name. Selecting a project brings you to the article sets (i.e. a collection of texts) this particular project contains. You can use each of your article sets separately or (selections of them) all together. On the AmCAT home page you can also find a number of public featured article sets you can use.

Figure 1.3 AmCAT Navigator Article Set Article Overview

As an example, we use an article set called 'Wikinews articles for terror*', an article set with all Wikinews articles including the word 'terror' from November 2004 until January 2015. As you can see in Figure 1.2, this article set includes 1406 articles. By clicking on the article set you will get an overview of all the articles in this set (see Figure 1.3). The overview shows you the (article)id, date, headline, mediumid, medium and lenght (in words) of each article in the article set. As you can see in Figure 1.3 (lower left corner), this article set includes a total of 1406 articles. You can click on any of these individual articles in this list, which directs you to the full lenght version of the article and a short list with article details. Before actually starting your content analysis, it is recommended that you first explore the articles in the article set by clicking on some of the articles in the set to get a good feel of the data you will be working with.

The AmCAT Query function

Figure 1.4 AmCAT Navigator Query Screen

You perform your automatic content analysis using the AmCAT Query function. After selecting an article set you get the overview of all the articles. In the upper left corner you find a blue 'Query' button. Click on this button and you get the AmCAT Query screen (see Figure 1.4). Note that in Figure 1.4 '17609 - Wikinews articles for terror*' is selected for use of the Query function. This 'Article sets' filter option makes it possible for you to select only one artice set for the analysis (as is the case in this example) or select multiple article sets from this particular project. When you don't select any article set, AmCAT automatically uses all the article sets of the selected project.

Figure 1.5 AmCAT Navigator Query Filter Options

AmCAT automatically selects all the articles in the selected article set(s) for your analyis. However, you can also select specific media and time periods of the articles you want to include in your analysis. You can define this subset of articles by selecting specific media ('Medium' button) or dates ('Date' button) among the 'Filter options' (see Figure 1.5). The standard configuration for 'Medium' is All media. Click on the drop down menu to select one or multiple media in your article set(s) to restrict your search order. Use the Ctrl button on your computer to select multiple media. The standard configuration for 'Date' is All dates. Select the time period of your preference by clicking on the drop down menu and selecting On, After, Between or Before and enter the chosen dates. If you prefer, you can save this selection of specific articles as a new article set (see Query functions below).

You start your automatic content analysis by Creating search strings (i.e. a combination of search terms) and entering them in the 'Keyword Search string(s)' field. You enter all the search terms covering what you perceive as being one topic on one row in this field. You can also enter multiple search strings in this field at the same time (if you want to compare different topics, for example) by starting each search string at a new row (use the Enter button on your computer). The length of your search strings is unlimited.

Vier thema's 1. Zoekopdracht (nieuwe pagina link naar zoektermen formuleren) 2. Selectie media en periode 3. Functions (nieuwe pagina link naar summary, article list + graph/table) 4. Hypothese toetsing (nieuwe pagina naar trends, patronen + verschillen)