QUANTEDA · User-Friendly Software For the Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data

User-Friendly Software For the Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data My objective is to produce a powerful, flexible, and user-friendly text analytic software tool called Quantext that has a graphical user interface and requires no programming experience. This tool would run entirely as a web application and require only a modern web browser for usage. The backend would run on the open-source quanteda text analysis library written in R and C++ that I developed in ERC-2011-StG-283794-QUANTESS, Quantitative Analysis of Text for the Social Sciences. My proposal is to harness the power of quanteda, combined with server-side data storage and processing, to make text analytics easy for end users with no programming skills. I am seeking funding for a 18-month period to develop a prototype web application where all of the storage and processing of texts is performed on a cloud server, and a user pays for access to this through a web-based user account. All of the software functionality would be built into a web interface using Javascript-based tools, mimicking a traditional desktop application but not requiring any user installation, with all processing done in the cloud. I would develop this proof of concept on a “freemium” model, with the “free” part dominating the first 18 months, as we developed the core scaffolding for the interface and built the server functionality for user accounts, authentication, text storage, and ultimately, a payment system. If this can be demonstrated to be fast, robust, and intuitively usable by non-technical testers, I would follow the proof-of-concept stage with an immediate commercialization plan, including marketing, vastly improving the website, and specifically targeting the functionality offered by existing tools aimed at the same market.