SentText: A Tool for Lexicon-based Sentiment Analysis in Digital Humanities

Abstract

We present SentText, a web-based tool to perform and explore lexicon-based sentiment analysis on texts, specifically developed for the Digital Humanities (DH) community. The tool was developed integrating ideas of the user-centered design process and we gathered requirements via semi-structured interviews. The tool offers the functionality to perform sentiment analysis with predefined sentiment lexicons or self-adjusted lexicons. Users can explore results of sentiment analysis via various visualizations like bar or pie charts and word clouds. It is also possible to analyze and compare collections of documents. Furthermore, we have added a close reading function enabling researchers to examine the applicability of sentiment lexicons for specific text sorts. We report upon the first usability tests with positive results. We argue that the tool is beneficial to explore lexicon-based sentiment analysis in the DH but can also be integrated in DHteaching.