Lexos

Lexos is a tool designed for transforming, analyzing, and visualizing texts. Lexos is designed for use primarily with small to medium-sized text collections, and especially for use with ancient languages and languages that do not employ the Latin alphabet. Lexos was created as an entry-level platform for Humanities scholars and students new to computational techniques while providing tools and techniques sophisticated enough for advanced research.

In developing Lexos, I have collaborated with faculty and students at Wheaton College in Massachusetts as part of the Lexomics group. Lexomics is our term for a set of computational techniques we use to study patterns in literature with a strong focus on medieval texts. However, Lexos is a general-purpose tool which can be used for texts in a wide variety of languages. It is particularly useful for cleaning up (scrubbing) texts so that they can be processed algorithmically.

Lexos began life as a web application, which is publically available at http://lexos.wheatoncollege.edu/ and is open-source and available on GitHub.

Lexos has now been re-implemented as a Python package, which is available on GitHub and can be installed from PyPI. The Python package is designed to be used in a Jupyter Notebook environment, and it provides an extended set of tools for text analysis and natural language processing (NLP).