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.

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.

Getting started with AmCAT[edit]

Why don't you take a Quick Tour of AmCAT functions?

When you're ready to get started with AmCAT, follow these steps to get set up:

  1. Create an account so you can log in
  2. Create a project
  3. Upload articles to a project

Using AmCAT[edit]

AmCAT can be used in a variety of ways:

  • Querying article sets to get an overview of your data, perform automatic quantitative content analysis based on keywords or to select and save a set of articles for further analysis
  • Manual annotation of articles
  • Use the Annotator to code articles

What's new in 3.4?[edit]

  • Layout modernized
  • The query screen is completely overhauled. You can now access all outputs (e.g. clustermaps) directly without first making a summary, and you can now save and load queries. This is also an important step to adding addition analysis scripts as plugins in the next version, e.g. R scripts for corpus analysis
  • article permissions are now based on articlesets instead of direct project membership, so a user can read an article if he has read access to the project the article set is in. Consequently, you can only link / save article sets to a new project if you have read access to the original project. This should prevent the frustration that you need to add users to various projects to get enough rights, and keep projects like 2 cleaner

Improving AmCAT[edit]

AmCAT is an open source project that depends on its community for success. Here's what you can do to help improve AmCAT:

  • Edit this wiki: Improve the documentation on this site by editing this wiki: improve articles to correct mistakes, or clarify things, etc.
  • Report problems, bugs, and great feature ideas on our issue tracker (Github account required)
  • Test new versions of AmCAT on preview.amcat.nl
  • Download the source code, setup your own server, clone it, and send us your improvements as pull requests!

Using AmCAT[edit]

AmCAT can be used in a variety of ways:

  • Querying article sets to get an overview of your data, perform automatic quantitative content analysis based on keywords or to select and save a set of articles for further analysis
  • Manual annotation of articles
  • Use the Annotator to code articles

What's new in 3.4?[edit]

  • Layout modernized
  • The query screen is completely overhauled. You can now access all outputs (e.g. clustermaps) directly without first making a summary, and you can now save and load queries. This is also an important step to adding addition analysis scripts as plugins in the next version, e.g. R scripts for corpus analysis
  • article permissions are now based on articlesets instead of direct project membership, so a user can read an article if he has read access to the project the article set is in. Consequently, you can only link / save article sets to a new project if you have read access to the original project. This should prevent the frustration that you need to add users to various projects to get enough rights, and keep projects like 2 cleaner

Improving AmCAT[edit]

AmCAT is an open source project that depends on its community for success. Here's what you can do to help improve AmCAT:

  • Edit this wiki: Improve the documentation on this site by editing this wiki: improve articles to correct mistakes, or clarify things, etc.
  • Report problems, bugs, and great feature ideas on our issue tracker (Github account required)
  • Test new versions of AmCAT on preview.amcat.nl
  • Download the source code, setup your own server, clone it, and send us your improvements as pull requests!
AmCAT Version
This page describes a feature in AmCAT
View other version: 3.3 - 3.4 - 3.5