BUTANE (BU Transcript Analytics & Exploration)

Developed by the Institute for Oral History and Data and Digital Scholarship team at Baylor University, BUTANE is a free data mining and visualization tool that allows users to analyze and explore data gathered from interviewee transcript responses in innovative and revealing ways.

What is BUTANE?

BUTANE offers a user-friendly suite of approaches to examine both existing interview collections as well as an effective way to assess material gathered in ongoing research projects. BUTANE can be used for a single transcript or employed to present broad snapshots of large collections. The tool can produce a quick report or offers more in-depth customization to meet the needs of particular users.

What can BUTANE show me?

Through just a few steps, BUTANE can run transcripts through a series of processes and produce the following in a downloaded report:

Frequency of shared nouns
Top five nouns by interviewee
Chronological references in interviews
Similarity matrix of interviewee responses
References to place in interviews
Positive and negative sentiment in interviews
Contextual data for important interview keywords

BUTANE Specifications and Documentation

BUTANE is a Python Jupyter Notebook hosted on the Google Colab platform.

BUTANE Instructions (PDF)

Glossary of Terms (PDF)

Developmental notes: The developmental team for BUTANE includes the following contributors:

Joshua Been, Assistant Librarian, Director of Data and Digital Scholarship
Stephen Sloan, Director, Institute for Oral History, Associate Professor, Department of History
Anupama Kanan, Undergraduate Student, majoring in biology and sociology, minoring in history
Eric Ames, Assistant Director, Marketing and Communications for ITS and University Libraries

Permissions

Use: Licensed under an MIT License.

Citation: Joshua Been and Stephen M. Sloan. BUTANE: Baylor University Transcript Analysis and Exploration. V. 2. Baylor University Libraries. Jupyter Notebooks. 2021.