A New Way to Search JSTOR: JSTOR Labs Introduces “Text Analyzer” (Beta)
UPDATE March 17, 2017 At the bottom of this post we’ve embedded the new “Intro to Text Analyzer” Video.
From a JSTOR Labs Post by Alex Humphrey’s:
I’m thrilled to announce the beta release of Text Analyzer, a new way to search for articles and books on JSTOR. Upload a document – the paper you’re writing, an article you’re reading, anything – and Text Analyzer inspects it, devises a set of terms the paper it “thinks” is about, and then recommends other scholarship from JSTOR based on those terms. To home in on the content you need, you can add and remove terms, increase the relative importance of some terms over others, or flag that you want you’re more interested in current content, or only want to see content you have access to within JSTOR.
[Clip]
Text Analyzer is still very much a beta! We think it will be useful to students and scholars, but we need your feedback to make it even better. This is why this is the first JSTOR Labs project to be developed directly within the user experience of the primary JSTOR site – so that we can refine it where it can have the biggest possible impact.
Read the Complete Blog Post Introduction, View Screenshots
Direct to JSTOR Labs Text Analyzer (Beta)
From Text Analyzer “Hints and Suggestions”
You can upload or point to many kinds of text documents, including: csv, doc, docx, gif, htm, html, jpg, jpeg, json, pdf, png, pptx, rtf, tif (tiff), txt, xlsx. If the file type you’re using isn’t in this list, just cut and paste any amount of text into the search form to analyze it.
- The more text within your document, the better.
- Be sure to use the controls to add, remove and adjust the importance of your prioritized terms. Add your own term or phrase if you’re not seeing it.
- The results are created using only the prioritized terms: be sure to add any identified term you want included.
- If you access Text Analyzer using your phone, a camera icon will appear — use it to take a picture of any page of text and search with that.
- To run Text Analyzer on the text of a webpage — whether it’s a Google Doc or a NY Times article — drag and drop or paste the URL into the search box.
- Get creative with the kinds of documents you search with: try your class syllabus, the webpage of a news article, or the first paragraph or outline of a paper you’re writing.
Filed under: Journal Articles, News
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.