CATMA is a practical and intuitive tool for literary scholars, students and other parties with an interest in text analysis and literary research. By helping perform many of the procedures useful for literary analysis that normally have to be carried out entirely manually, CATMA permits to save a great amount of time and work. Being implemented as a web application in the newest version, CATMA also facilitates the exchange of analytical results via the internet, which makes collaborative work more comfortable.
- Freely producible Tagsets, suitable to apply analytical categories of individual choice to the text
- The possibility of advanced search in the text, using the natural language based Query Builder
- A set of predefined statistical and non-statistical analytical functions
- The visualization of the distribution of items of interest (e.g. words, word-groups or Tags) in the text
- The possibility to analyze whole corpora of texts in one work step
- Easy switching between the different modules
- The easy exchange of documents, Tagsets and Markup information, facilitating cooperative textual analysis
- A context sensitive help function and a user manual for better usability
The development of CATMA was inspired by TACT (short for Textual Analysis Computing Tools), a DOS based tool set for textual analysis created at Toronto University. Two of CATMA's main features, the Tagger and the Analyzer, trace back to functions that were implemented in TACT programs already. The CATMA team constantly works on improving the tagging and analyzing functionalities and aims to enhance the usability of the application: CATMA is designed for users with little experience in digital text analysis and should always be easy to handle.
For information on how CATMA supports not only literary analysis, but also the generation of interpretative statements about texts, i.e. hypotheses about their meaning, please see the CLÉA section.
