What Dexter is
Dexter is a suite of software tools that enable you to perform coding and analysis of language data in the form of transcripts of speech or written documents. It is designed to work both with user-collected data and with files from selected language corpora.
The Dexter Coder
The central tool is the Dexter Coder, which displays your document nicely in a window and allows you to define and add annotations to the document. These annotations, called "codes", may represent anything you like; what you study is entirely up to you. The codes are displayed as colored highlights in the document, and each type of code may be shown or hidden.
With the Coder's search tool you can perform complex searches of the codes, the text, and any document metadata. All annotations are saved in a separate XML file, a technique known as stand-off markup. This allows you to perform an infinite number of analyses on a single document (though we don't recommend an infinite number) without changing the document itself.
The Dexter Converter
The other tool currently in the Dexter suite is the Dexter Converter, a powerful conversion tool that converts your documents into the XML format that the Coder requires, dubbed DexML. Your documents may start out as plain text or as another form of XML, and the Converter will walk you through the conversion to DexML, which is compliant with the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative.
The second-most interesting thing about the Dexter Converter is that it analyzes your document and figures out many of its properties itself, so that you don't have to make as many decisions when doing a conversion (though you may override its choices). The most interesting thing is that during the conversion, it employs an interactive error-correction process; if it finds an error in your transcript, it will show it to you and allow you to make corrections on the spot, so it can continue the conversion.
Who is Dexter for? Researchers in education, linguistics, discourse, psychology, sociology, law, or anyone else who needs to perform detailed analyses of language. Teachers who are interested in the classroom mechanics of their own courses may also find Dexter useful.
What Dexter isn't
Dexter is not a transcription tool. Dexter operates on text files, not sound or video files. You supply the documents, and Dexter supplies tools to perform the coding and analysis. If you need a transcription tool, we can point you to some good ones that are freely available.
Dexter is also not a corpus concordancer. While it does include a powerful search tool, its specialty is working with single documents, not whole corpora. In the future, we plan to add the capability of searching multiple documents at once, but you will still need to convert your documents to DexML first.
Who we are
Dexter is being developed at Boston University by Gregory Garretson and Cathy O'Connor. The development of Dexter is generously funded by a grant from the Spencer Foundation.
Why we're doing this
We have perceived a lack of simple-to-use and affordable tools for researchers in education and language sciences. With Dexter, we aim to fill that gap, promoting the serious and detailed analysis of human language and interaction. Furthermore, we belive that the free sharing of data and tools within and across disciplines is in the best interest of all. The Spencer Foundation, which shares our vision, is supporting the project.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.