The interactive Leipzig Corpus Miner: An extensible and adaptable text analysis tool for content analysis

Abstract

We present the interactive Leipzig Corpus Miner (iLCM), which is the result of the development of an integrated research environment for the analysis of text data. The key features of iLCM compared to existing software tools for computer-assisted text analysis are its flexibility and scalability. The tool includes functions to offer commonly needed methods for automatic processing of text, such as preprocessing, standard text analysis, and visualization, which would be very time consuming without a ready-to-use software tool. To also provide more methodological flexibility, the iLCM is not tied to one specific class of research question, but can easily be extended to other applications. In this article, we will focus on the capabilities and the aspects of adaptability, extensibility, and data exchange with other tools from the field of empirical content analysis. We will present the features of the iLCM and showcase individual examples and a case study that demonstrates the practical use of the tool.