Last update: 6. October 2023

authors: members of the section of Communication Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
program: AmCAT 3.4
documentation: book ad more information
download: none, you work online
operating system: irrelevant, you work online
description: AmCAT was an online tool for content analyses, especially relational content analysis. Currently work seems to be under development.

author: Matthias Romppel
program: CoAn 2.08
documentation: printed manual in German
download: test
operating system: Win 3.x, Win9x, WinNT, does not run on 64-bit systems
description: word list, concordances, frequencies of categories COAN is inspired by a former Intext version. It uses dictionaries to code texts, special features are interactive coding, powerful search patterns like word co-occurences. It is available in German only.
Personal comment: this site has not been updated since 2006.

program: DICTION 7.0
author: Roderick P. Hart

distributor: Digitext Inc., Austin, TX, USA
download: trial version
tutorial: videos
operating system: MS-Windows, Mac OS-X
description: Diction uses dictionaries (word-lists) to search a text for these qualities:

• Certainty: Language indicating resoluteness, inflexibility, and completeness and a tendency to speak ex-cathedra.
• Activity: Language featuring movement, change, the implementation of ideas and the avoidance of inertia.
• Optimism: Language describing tangible, immediate, recognizable matters that affect people's everyday lives.
• Commonality: Language highlighting the agreed-upon values of a group and rejecting idiosyncratic modes of engagement.
• Realism: Language describing tangible, immediate, recognizable matters that affect people's everyday lives

The results can be statistically analysed and are compared with other texts, so that an under- or overrepresentation of categories can be detected.

program: General Inquirer
author: Philip J. Stone
download: yes, but only the category systems
operating system: Java, category systems are Excel-files (XLS)
documentation: description of categories not available currently
description: The grandfather of many content analysis software is now available for computers that run Java and are able to read the category system (Excel files). Philip J. Stone died in 2006, his work is continued.

program: KH Coder 3
author and distributor: Koichi Higuchi
download: free download
operating system: MS-Windows, Mac OS-X, Linux
documentation: Manual
description: KH Coder is a free software for quantitative content analysis or text mining. It supports the analysis of texts in Japanese, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. KH Coder has following features: Words: Frequency List, Searching, KWIC Concordance, Collocation Stats, Correspondence Analysis, Multi-Dimensional Scaling, Hierarchical Cluster Analysis, Co-Occurrence Network

• Categories: Developing Your Own Coding Rules, Frequency List, Cross Tabulation, Correspondence Analysis, Multi-Dimensional Scaling, Co-Occurrence Network, Hierarchical Cluster Analysis
• Documents: Searching, Clustering, Naive Bayes classifier

KH Coder provides these functions using back-end tools such as Stanford POS Tagger, Snowball stemmer, MySQL and R. Just input raw texts and you can utilize these functionalities.

program: LIWC 2022 - LInguistic Word Count
author: James B. Pennebaker
Roger J. Booth, and Martha E. Francis.
documentation: videos hidden in the help section
documentation: manual
download: none, but you can test it online with a small text.
operation system: MS-Windows, Mac OS-X
description: The program analyses text files on a word-by-word basis, calculating percentage words that match each of several language dimensions. The program has 68 pre-set dimensions (output variables) including linguistic dimensions, word categories tapping psychological constructs, and personal concern categories, and can accommodate user-defined dimensions as well.
LIWC 2020 is the newest version of the dictionary, a German version is currently under development.

program: Dimap 4.0 with MCCA
operating system: Win95
authors: Ken Litkowski, Donald McTavish
distributor: CL Research
download: test
documentation: no, but many white papers on the website
description: DIMAP/MMCA description

personal comment: the web pages are outdated, one last edited in 2001 (sic!)

program: PCAD 3
author and distributor: GB Software

documentation: manual
download: no
operating system(s): Win 3.1 or newer including Windows 10
description: The primary area of interest is measuring psychobiologically interesting states such as anxiety, hostility, and hope using the Gottschalk-Gleser content analysis scales. These scales have been empirically developed and tested, and have been shown to be reliable and valid in a wide range of studies. Louis A. Gottschalk (M.D. Ph.D.) has been the principal developer of these scales, and has applied them in many areas of medicine and beyond.

program: TextQuest 4.2
author and distributor: Social Science Consulting

download: test version in English and German
manual: Manual as a PDF-file, also included in the test version's installation folder
operating system(s): MS-Windows, Mac OS-X
description: TextQuest uses dictionaries to code texts, special features are interactive coding, powerful search patterns like word co-occurences, and negation detection for English and German. The text exploring features are word lists supporting sort order tables, exclusion lists (STOP-words), KWIC-lines with variable length, and lists of word sequences (phrases) and word permutations. The readability module consists of 80 readability formula for 8 languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish) and language independent ones. TextQuest is available with an English or German user interface. It includes a category manager that allows to created a category system from a word list, and also standard category systems are included in the full version, e.g. RID (Regressive Imagery Dictionary) for English and German, and the HKW (Hamburger kommunikationssoziologisches Wörterbuch) . A completly new version will be release at the end of 2023.

author: Cynthia Whissell

distributor: unknown
program: dictionary of Affect in Language (DAL)
operating system: MS-Windows 7 and newer, freeware
documentation: manual
download: DAL setup
description: The Dictionary of Affect in Language (DAL) is an attempt to quantify emotion in language. Volunteers viewed many thousands of words and rated them in terms of their Pleasantness, Activation, and Imagery (concreteness). The DAL is embedded in a computer program which is used to score language samples on the basis of these three dimensions. The DAL has been applied to studies of fiction (e.g., Frankenstein, David Copperfield), of poetry (e.g., the work of Frost, Blake), drama (e.g., Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies), advertisements, group discussions, and lyrics (e.g., the Beatles). It has also been used in the selection of words for memory research.

program: WordStat 9
author: Normand Peladeau
distributor: Provalis Research
documentation: manual as a PDF-file
download: test version requires registration
operating systems: MS-Windows
description: WordStatis especially useful for the coding of answers to open ended questions. It also includes thesauri and spell-checker for different languages. It comes with Colin Martindale's RID - Regressive Imagery Dictionary (English, French, Portuguese, Swedish, German, Latin) and a few other dictionaries and thesauri (WordNet, Roget's thesaurus). Version 7.1 offers geospatial processing, and also WordStat is available for Stata.

program: Yoshikoder 0.6.5
author: William Lowe

author: Will Lowe
distributor: Will Lowe
documentation: user documentation
download: free version
operating systems: MS-Windows, Mac OS-X, Linux, with Java environment
description: Yoshikoder works with text documents, whether in plain ASCII, Unicode (e.g. UTF-8), or a national encodings (e.g. Big5 Chinese.) You can construct, view, and save keywords-in-context. You can write content analysis dictionaries can be constructed using PERL-style regular expressions. Yoshikoder provides summaries of documents, either as word frequency tables or according to a content analysis dictionary. You can also compare documents according to word frequency profile or with respect to a content dictionary. Yoshikoder's native file format is XML, so dictionaries and keyword-in-context files are non-proprietary and human readable. The RID and LIWC are also available.