TEXTPACK: A System for Computer-aided Quantitative Content Analysis

Originally designed for the analysis of open ended questions in surveys, TEXTPACK has been extended over the years to cope with many aspects of computer aided text analysis and most of content analysis. This version includes options to allow faster and easier analyses as well as validation and reliability studies.

Features of TEXTPACK

The majority of the procedures in TEXTPACK assist the user in exploring and editing texts; two procedures are designed for purely quantitative analysis. In the area of computer aided content analysis, TEXTPACK is suitable both for analysis with a strict dictionary approach and for empirical approaches.

In addition, and as a major advantage, TEXTPACK contains special-purpose procedures which allow you to categorize/classify/tag any kind of text according to so called "content analytic dictionaries". The process of text classification is the goal of TEXTPACK and, thus, all other procedures function as service procedures which help to browse, to print a text file, to develop and validate a dictionary, and, most importantly, to help you to use the final numeric output, for example frequencies of categories, with statistical packages like SPSS or SAS for further quantitative or logical analyses. Of course, TEXTPACK can also be used simply for word frequencies, concordances, vocabulary comparison - without the goal of automatically categorizing the text.

Funktions in TEXTPACK

TEXTPACK offers among other things the following features:

Word frequencies for the entire text or its sub-units
The word frequencies can be restricted in volume by different options. The frequencies may be printed in different sort orders (alphabetically sorted, sorted by frequencies etc.)
Keyword-in-Context and Keyword-out-of-Context
Single words, word roots or multiple word combinations may be shown in their context.
Cross-references and Concordances
Word Comparison of two Texts
Coding
TEXTPACK categorizes/classifies a text according to a user dictionary. It generates files with both category frequencies and category sequences. The validity of the coding can be checked by various options (e.g., the insertion of category numbers in the continuous text).
Selection of Text units
TEXTPACK allows you two different options to select text units: to specify a filter on the basis of the identification or to use a numeric file to select text units. In the second case a new SENTENCE file which includes all selected texts will be stored for further use.

You may download the short description of TEXTPACK as a PDF file. The short description of TEXTPACK includes a short introduction, an explanation of terminology, and a short description of the functions in TEXTPACK. The core of the description are two examples how you can work with TEXTPACK: "Going from Raw Text to an Alphabetically Sorted Word List" and "Keyword in Context List and Coding".

Demo Version

You may download complimentary demo of TEXTPACK for Windows and a description how to use the demo. We have put all the power of TEXTPACK to it, but allow access only to our example text files.

Hardware and operating system

TEXTPACK can be installed on all PCs running under a Windows operating system like Windows 2000, XP or Vista.

TEXTPACK References

We compiled a reference list containing a selection of references that describe TEXTPACK applications to give an impression of the features of TEXTPACK. The list is not a complete list of all references and it lists German as well as English publications. In addition to this reference list, TEXTPACK applications and applications of other programs for content analysis are described in our report "Computerunterstützte Inhaltsanalyse: Literaturbericht zu neueren Anwendungen; Cornelia Züll und Juliane Landmann" (German only).

Contact person

Cornelia Zuell
+49 (621) 1246-147
textpack(at)gesis(dot)org