Law and Literacy in Non-Consumptive Text Mining: Guiding Researchers Through the Landscape of Computational Text Analysis

"Imagine you are working with two digital humanities scholars studying post-WWII poetry, both of whom are utilizing a single group of copyright-protected works. The first scholar has collected dozens of these poems to closely analyze artistic approach within a literary framework. The second has built a personal database of the poems to apply automated techniques and statistical methods to identify patterns in the poems’ syntax. This latter methodology—in which previously unknown patterns, trends, or relationships are extracted from a collection of textual documents—is an example of “computational text analysis” (CTA),2 also commonly referred to as “text mining” or “text data mining.”3 ..."