Touring TAMS Analyzer! (Text Analysis Markup System)
A Digital Humanities Project
Whats Going on Here?
I am a graduate student enrolled in a digital humanities (DH) class, and one of my class assignments was to complete a documented exploration of a DH tool. I selected Text Analysis Markup System (TAMS Analyzer), an open source program that allows users to quickly code sections of text. Although TAMS is most often employed to encode ethnographic documents such as interviews, users may also use this program to analyze pretty much any plain text. For example, I had no trouble using TAMS to annotate samples from the “Letters to the Editor” section of the Marine Corps Gazette. My experience working with these “Letters” within TAMS informs this tutorial, which will walk you through the basics of using this program on a Macintosh computer.
Why Use TAMS?
TAMS allows you to encode sections of texts in order to make them searchable within your corpus. For example, you may want to encode sections of your text relating to gender so that you can go back later and quickly and accurately find any instances of this topic in your documents. Once you develop a code, you simply need to highlight sections of the text and double click your code (which remains in a menu to the left of your screen) in order to encode the material. This program will be useful for researchers who have a large amount of material they would like to annotate and search.
What TAMS Is Not
When you use TAMS, be prepared to go through and encode all of your texts yourself. When I first downloaded this tool, I thought the program would automatically apply my developed codes to my entire text. However, this is not the case.
*Make sure you check out my comments on the right side of your screen! I offer tangential insights and advice about my experience with TAMS.
Getting Started
In order to access TAMS, you need to go to http://tamsys.sourceforge.net and click “Download” in the menu on the left side of the webpage.
Once you click “Download,” you will be taken to the following webpage:
Now that you are on the “Download” page, you need to decide which version of TAMS you would like to access. The site gives you several options based on the number of users that will use the program and the operating system version your computer runs on. Since I am the only one using TAMS, and my computer runs on Lion, I downloaded the single user Lion-Maverick version. You just need to double click the link of the version you prefer in order to download it.
Opening TAMS
After you download TAMS, you will need to drag and drop the file to your “Applications” folder. As you can see, the TAMS folder contains several files. The most useful of these documents is the “TA4 User Guide,” which takes users through a step-by-step guide of the program. However, readers must get through a lot of theory before they can learn how to actually use the tool.
Next, you want to click on the “TAMS Analyzer,” the last file in this folder. You may have to adjust your “Security and Privacy” settings on your Mac in order for the program to run. For example, I had to switch my privacy setting from allowing applications only from the Mac App Store and certain developers to allowing them from anywhere. Once you do this, you should be ready to use TAMS!
Creating a Project in TAMS
Once you get TAMS running, you will be prompted to either create or open a project. Since you are new to the program, you will not have any projects saved. So, here’s what you’ll need to do:
- Type a name for a project you would like to create in the “Project Name” box.
- Select a “Project Location” by clicking the “Browse” button and choosing a file on your computer where you would like to house your project.
- Make sure the “Add to working projects” box is checked.
- Click “Create” in the bottom right corner.
Great! Now you’ve created a new project. Next, your workbench will open:
In the “Info” tab of your workbench, you can type information about your project. As you can see, I typed in information about the name of my project and included a brief description. This information is simply a matter of good housekeeping, so don’t feel obligated to fill out this form.
Adding Files to Your Project
Next, click the “Files” tab of your workbench. This is were you create or import files that you would like to analyze in TAMS. As you can see, this area is currently blank.
To create a new file, follow these steps:
- Click “New” in the upper left corner.
- Type a name in the “Data file name” box.
- Click “Ok.”
A new window will open up. This is where you will annotate and encode your text. Right now the window is blank, so you will need to copy and paste your chosen text into the window.
Once you paste your text into the window, you should see something like this:
Now, the real fun begins!
Encoding Your Text with TAMS
TAMS offers a quick and easy way for users to encode sections of a text so that they may effectively search for these segments later on. To create a code in TAMS, follow these steps:
- Highlight the section of the text that you would like to code for characteristics you deem important for your research.
- Click in the box under “Apply code.” This is where you will type the code identifying the characteristics of the passage you’ve selected.
- Type the code you would like to apply to this section of the text. I like to code for a broader category and identify a specific feature of that category, which follows this format: broadercategory>featureofcategory. Make sure you do not use capital letters, spaces, or any special characters other than the greater than sign (>) as you code. For example, if I want to code a section of the text identifying the author as female, it would look something like this: author>female.
- Click “apply code.” As you can see, this action applies the code around the section of text I’ve selected. It also saves the code in the menu on the left. This is useful because if you would like to use the code again for a different section of the text, you simply need to highlight the portion of the text, and double click the code in the menu. This makes the coding process much more effective and expeditious.
*** Make sure you manually save your work often. TAMS will not automatically save your work for you.
As you create new codes, TAMS will prompt you with the option to add a description to the code. For example, when I create a new code identifying someone’s military rank as a major (rank>major), TAMS will ask me to describe what this code means. Since you will probably create numerous codes, this function will be helpful in reminding you what each code means later on.
You can also select what color you would like your code to be. You do this by clicking the black box next to “color” and selecting a hue.
Once you’ve written a description and selected a color for your code, click “Ok.”
As you can see, the code marking the author’s rank as a major is now blue. Selecting different colors for each code makes it easier for you to identify each unique code later on.
Continue creating codes to identify any features of the text you deem important. Once you’re finished, your text might look something like this:
If you have passages that contain characteristics of several of the codes you’ve developed, you can embed codes. This simply means that you’ll have multiple codes surrounding a single passage. To do this, highlight the text and double click any codes you would like to apply to the selection, starting with the most inclusive code and ending with the most specific. This will ensure that you will get the most inclusive data possible when you run your searches.
Once you’re done coding, save your work.
Repeat!
You will now need to go back to your workbench. Continue to add new files with unique and purposeful names, code them, save your work, and repeat until you’ve completed this process for your entire corpus (all the works you would like to analyze in this project).
Creating a Search
Now that you have an encoded dataset, you can easily perform searches to summon passages of your text. To do this, go back to your workbench, and click the “Files” tab.
Within this tab, there are two windows. The left window holds any files you’ve uploaded to this project. Meanwhile, the right window contains files that you would like to include in your search list.
You need to move any files you would like to search into the “Search List.” You can do this by highlighting the file in the “Holder” window and clicking the “Add >” button. Repeat this action until you have all the files you want in the search list.
As you can see below, I’ve chosen to analyze any file with “Marine Corps Gazette” in its title.
Next, click the “Search” tab at the top of your workbench (located next to the “Files” tab). This tab contains a list of all of the codes I’ve created for the documents I analyzed and coded. This makes the search process much simpler because you just need to double click the code of which you would like to search for instances within the files you’ve selected.
For example, I want to search for passages where an author makes an appeal to her/his own ethos or credibility. So, I double click the code “authorquality>ethos.” This action copies this code into the “Search” bar.
Now, make sure “Raw” is checked, and click “Search.”
TAMS will prompt you to name your “Result file.”
Before I name my file, I uncheck the “Temporary” box because I would like TAMS to save my results rather than throwing them out once I close out of the program.
I name my “Result file” “ethos,” and click “Ok.”
The program opens a new window displaying any instance where I coded for “authorquality>ethos.” While I only used a small sample of files for this tutorial, anyone working with hundreds of documents would certainly appreciate the time-saving value of such searches.
My search returned five instances of ethos from all of my files. Each entry contains information about the passage I coded for ethos such as the length of the passage, its beginning and ending location within the file, and I can even see which file the passage came from.
If I click on one of the entries, the text will be shown in full in the window above my search results. For example, you can see the content on entry five in the window because I clicked this entry.
While specific searches are useful for researchers who know what they are looking for, some of you may not be so sure. Perhaps you want to search through all of the passages you’ve encoded. If this is your case, you’ll want to perform an unlimited search.
Unlimited Searches
To perform an unlimited search, go back to your workbench, make sure the files you want to explore are in the “Search List” window, and click the “Search” tab.
Make sure the “Search” bar is blank, and the “Raw” box is checked. Click the “Search” button.
Unless you would like to name and save your file, feel free to leave these items blank in the small window that pops up. Click “Ok.”
Your screen should look something like this:
This unlimited search pulls up every coded passage in your corpus. Although my small sample only contains 44 entries, a larger corpus encoded over the course of a year or more could easily have an overwhelming number of coded passages. Even within these 44 entires, I may suddenly decide that I only want to see where the author criticizes another’s argument (othersargument>criticism). If this is the case, I will need to perform a search for that code.
How to Perform A Search within Unlimited Results
Searching within the unlimited results I’ve summoned is actually pretty easy.
- First, click on the “_code” category in order to highlight the entire column.
2. Next, click the “Results” tab at the top of your computer screen and double click the “Select” option.
3. A new window will prompt you to type in the code that you would like TAMS to search for within your unlimited results. Type the code into the provided space. For example, I typed “othersargument>criticism” because I would like to see all the passages where the author criticizes someone else’s argument. Once you’ve typed in the code, click “Ok.”
As you can see, this search found five instances of this code within my larger corpus. If I were working with a much larger dataset, this quick acquisition of relevant passages would be a lifesaver! Even within my own small sample, TAMS makes gathering passages about a specific topic much faster than going through my own handwritten/annotated notes.
Conclusion
While this is not a comprehensive tutorial, I hope it successfully introduces new users to the basics of TAMS Analyzer. You should now have a better understanding of how to download TAMS, create a new project, input files to that project, code your texts, and search for specific codes within those files.
Please feel free to leave comments on my tutorial. Suggest points of clarification, discuss how your own experience with TAMS differs from the one portrayed on this site, and offer suggestions for what you found works well when running the program.
If you’re interested in accessing more materials related to TAMS Analyzer, check out these YouTube tours (not tutorials):
