Software Support for Discourse-Based Textual Information Analysis: A Systematic Literature Review and Software Guidelines in Practice

Abstract

[Abstract] The intrinsic characteristics of humanities research require technological support and software assistance that also necessarily goes through the analysis of textual narratives. When these narratives become increasingly complex, pragmatics analysis (i.e., at discourse or argumentation levels) assisted by software is a great ally in the digital humanities. In recent years, solutions have been developed from the information visualization domain to support discourse analysis or argumentation analysis of textual sources via software, with applications in political speeches, debates, online forums, but also in written narratives, literature or historical sources. This paper presents a wide and interdisciplinary systematic literature review (SLR), both in software-related areas and humanities areas, on the information visualization and the software solutions adopted to support pragmatics textual analysis. As a result of this review, this paper detects weaknesses in existing works on the field, especially related to solutions’ availability, pragmatic framework dependence and lack of information sharing and reuse software mechanisms. The paper also provides some software guidelines for improving the detected weaknesses, exemplifying some guidelines in practice through their implementation in a new web tool, Viscourse. Viscourse is conceived as a complementary tool to assist textual analysis and to facilitate the reuse of informational pieces from discourse and argumentation text analysis tasks.