Difference between revisions of "3.3:Quick Tour"

Revision as of 12:21, 29 March 2015

An AmCAT project starts in the AmCAT Navigator. Open 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.

Logging in brings you to the AmCAT home page, where you can access and manage your AmCAT projects by clicking on the 'Manage Projects' button. This directs you to the location where your AmCAT projects are stored. These can be your own projects or the projects of other AmCAT users that allow you to take on a guest role. You can choose to list either your 'Active Projects', your 'Archived Projects' or 'All Projects' by clicking on these tabs (see Figure 2.1). AmCAT displays your active projects by default, listing all the AmCAT projects you are currently working on. This list is empty for a new user, but you can easily create a new AmCAT project.

Figure 2.1 AmCAT Navigator Manage Projects

If you want to start a new AmCAT project, the first step is to create a new AmCAT project and to upload articles to this project. When the AmCAT project has been created and articles have been uploaded, you select the relevant project by clicking on the project name. Selecting a project brings you to the article sets (i.e. collections 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 2.2 AmCAT Navigator Example Article Set

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 2.2, 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 2.3). 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 2.3 (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. You can also start querying your article sets to get a more general overview of your data.

Figure 2.3 AmCAT Navigator Article Set Article Overview

When you are familiar with the type of data you are dealing with, you can start your automatic or manual content analysis by querying your article sets. You perform your automatic content analysis using the AmCAT Query Search 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 search screen (see Figure 2.4). Here you select media and time periods of the articles you want to include in your analysis and, if applicable, save this selection of specific articles as a new article set. 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. The length of your search strings is unlimited.

Figure 2.4 AmCAT Navigator Query Screen

The AmCAT Query search has various functions you can use to analyse your data. Among the 'Output options' you find summary, article list and graph/table output options, each representing a main function of automatic content analysis in AmCAT.

You can test various hypotheses using content analysis. You can extrapolate your findings (i.e. generalization them to a broader context, which you have not actually measured). Examples of such extrapolations are trends, patterns and differences. From these trends, patterns and differences you observe in the collection of documents that you analyzed (your sample), you can draw conclusions about similar documents that you have not actually analyzed (the population) and thus test your hypotheses.