Open source for content analysis

In thinking about open source materials during this round of #digPINS, I also realize that sometimes it might also be easy to overlook many open sources that we use all the time.  Take my own personal example of thinking about open source materials in geography.  While I did find a few texts (but not many), and curated content (thanks Seth Dixon – Scoop It!), many of the articles were paid access.  What I hadn’t really considered is something that I’m working on right now with my research.  A colleague of mine (thanks Darren Purcell) introduced me to Voyant Tools and has been gracious enough to work withe me on uploading textbook chapters into this open source software program.  The program is capable of taking large amounts of texts and providing some tools to  help researchers analyze digital texts – in my case, to examine the representations of a select marginalized group that are in textbooks.  As a researcher, it’s nice to know that there is free, helpful software available for use!  So perhaps part of my shift needs to be not in just thinking about content as open source, but other resources that we use beyond content.  This is a mind shift I hadn’t considered when thinking about open source originally, and I’m happy to discover it now for the future.