Training course in the TRACER software, which is used by researchers to compare texts and text versions in order to recognize the reuse of verbatim and near verbatim quotations, paraphrases and even ideas and allusions. The methodology will be demonstrated by examining dependencies in English Bible Editions, but the software is language-independent and is to be used in your own research on contemporary and historical languages.
TRACER is a framework of roughly 700 algorithms, whose features can be combined to create the optimal model for detecting those words, sentences and ideas that have been reused across texts. Created by Marco Büchler, TRACER is designed to facilitate research in automatic text reuse detection. The thousands of feature combinations that TRACER supports allow to investigate not only contemporary texts, but also historical texts. TRACER has been successfully tested on Ancient Greek, Arabic, Coptic, English, German, Hebrew, Latin and Tibetan.
The software TRACER is a command line engine. The reason it does not come with a user-interface is to boost computing speed. TRACER can use large and remotely-accessible servers, which facilitate the computation of large data-sets. The reuse results can be visualised in a more readable format via TRAViz.
There are five tasks we ask you to complete before the workshop. If you don’t, the software won’t run on your machine!
The terminal or command line is a text interface located on every computer which we’ll need for our tutorial. On Macs, the terminal is located in Applications > Utilities; on a Windows and Linux machines, the terminal is located in Programs. Windows users may additionally install Putty.
If you don’t have one already, please install a text editor on your laptop. Our recommendation is that you install the free Sublime Text Editor but any text editor will work.
If you don’t have one already, please install a file archiver/extractor such as WinZip or 7-Zip.
The software we’ll be using requires that your computers have a current Java JDK package installed. You can download Java JDK for your operating system from here.
Installing Java is straightforward. However, should you need more detailed instructions, you can visit:
Please check Java was successfully installed by:
Is anything unclear or are you having troubles? Please send all your comments and concerns to:
buechler(at)infai(dot)org