Hamlet II is a tool for quantitative textual analysis

By Avishek Majumder & Priya Chetty on July 20, 2018

Quantitative analysis of textual data has been long used in the field of social sciences research. This includes data collected from open ended surveys and interview questions. Analysis of text-based data helps in assessment of trends in social sciences. In addition, qualitative analysis of textual data helps in validation statistics, co-occurrences of words/texts, textual trends and frequency statistics. A number of tools have been developed that help in textual analysis of text based data. Hamlet II version is one such tool.

Software description: Hamlet II

Hamlet II is a software that helps in quantitative analysis of text. It is a multidimensional scaling approach to quantitative textual analysis. It also serves as computer assisted text analysis. Hamlet was developed with the objective to assess individual and joint word frequencies, so that their resulting similarities and co-occurrences can be statistically assessed. The interface of Hamlet II version 3.0 software is presented below. It is available for Windows, iOS and Linux.

HAMLET II for windows interface
HAMLET II for windows interface

List of statistical analyses in Hamlet II

The list of statistical analyses available in Hamlet II software comprise of eight different statistics.

Statistical analysis

Types of analyses

Word usage and frequencies Word list

Comparison of word list

Key Word In Context (KWIC)

Text profile

Comparing the vocabularies of a number of texts

Analysis of joint frequencies of words The vocabulary list

Context units

Text conventions

Joint Frequencies

Cluster analysis Non-hierarchical clustering
Correspondence Analysis Using Correspondence Analysis
Singular Value Decomposition (MDPREF) Using Singular Value Decomposition
Multidimensional Scaling Non-metric and metric multidimensional scaling methods

Using MINISSA and MRSCAL

Individual Differences Scaling (INDSCAL)

Procrustean Individual Differences Scaling (PINDIS)

Multiple text comparison
Latent Dirichlet Allocation for discovery of latent topics

Advantages of Hamlet II

  1. It allows joint frequencies within any specified context unit, within sentences, or as collocations within a given span of words.
  2. It allows empirical properties of texts and graphical presentations.
  3. The software provides maximum transparency of the processes involved in a single and user-friendly interface.
  4. Matrices along with cluster analysis and multi-dimensional scaling help identify and assess significant word-associations.
  5. Joint non-occurrences and the measure of association strength of text helps with statistical assessment of probabilistic affinity index.
  6. It allows to list words common to pairs of texts, and is useful in generating vocabulary lists, including synonyms, for use in comparing a number of texts.
  7. It has made provision of Vocabulary Editor and pre-installed list of automated English vocabulary.
  8. .txt file most commonly used in frequency analyses and other simpler analyses.
  9. In addition, numerical results saved in CSV format for further statistical analysis in STATA, Microsoft Excel or R.
  10. Available in Windows, iOS and Linux
  11. It is freely available in trial mode for 1 month with unlimited accessibility

Using Hamlet II for textual analysis of interview transcripts and semi structured questionnaires, search text files for words or categories in a given vocabulary list is possible. Furthermore, the software comprises of counting joint frequencies within any specified context unit, and within sentences.

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