Swiss-AL Tools

Swiss-AL Tools#

The platform groups its analysis tools into two sections, matching the two ways people usually approach a corpus. Explore Corpus lets the data lead: use it when you have no specific hypothesis and want patterns to emerge. Search Corpus starts from a term you already have in mind and shows you where, when, and how it occurs.

If you want to know…	Use	Section
What is in this corpus, and does it cover the period and sources I need?	Overview	Explore
What themes run through this corpus?	Topics	Explore
What is distinctive about my subcorpus compared with the corpus it came from?	Keywords	Explore
Which other words are used in similar contexts to my term?	Semantic Space	Explore
How often does my term occur, and how has that changed over time or across sources?	Distribution of Words	Search
How is my term actually used in running text?	Context of Words	Search
Which documents should I read?	Distribution in Documents	Search
Which words habitually occur alongside my term?	Common Pairings	Search

Tip

The tools work well in sequence. A common pattern is to use Topics or Semantic Space to discover which terms are worth pursuing, then Distribution of Words to see how those terms behave over time, and finally Context of Words or Distribution in Documents to read how they are actually used. Findings from the exploratory tools are starting points for interpretation, not results in themselves.