Welcome to ViTA!

ViTA (Visualization for Text Alignment) is a web-based tool for exploring and identifying shared passages between two sample texts. It is part of an on-going research project and is a work in progress. We welcome any comments, questions, or suggestions from your experience in using this tool.

Find alignment »

Quick start guide

  1. Choose either a pre-loaded text as your target and source inputs, or you can enter your own texts in the text areas.
  2. Create a method in the Editor by simply drag-and-drop a tool into the grid layout.
  3. If you have more than one tool in your method, you would need to link the tools together using the connectors (that is represented by the checkboxes underneath each of the grid positions).
  4. Once you have created your method, you can start processing your texts by clicking on Run.

Start using ViTA

About

ViTA (Visualization for Text Alignment) is an experimental service offered by the Oxford e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford for the exploration and identification of similar passages between two pieces of texts. The goal of ViTA is to provide different users with a facility to experiment with different detection method each of which consists several tools organised into a pipeline.

ViTA has been developed for the project Commonplace Cultures: Mining Shared Passages in the 18th Century using Sequence Alignment and Visual Analytics. The project explored the paradigm shift in the 18th-century culture from the perspective of commonplaces and their textual and historical deployment in the contexts of collecting, reading, writing, classifying, and learning. The project is part of the international "Digging into Data Challenge (Programme III), and is funded by the JISC in the UK, and the National Endowment for the Humanities in the USA. It is a collaboration between the University of Oxford and the University of Chicago. The principal investigators are Min Chen and Robert Morrissey, with further participation from Alfie Abdul-Rahman, Nicholas Cronk, Ian Foster, Clovis Gladstone, Mark Olsen, Glenn Roe, and Richard Whaling (in alphabetical order). This web version of ViTA was developed by Alfie Abdul-Rahman.

We welcome any comments, questions, or suggestions from your experience in using ViTA.

Contact us

Please fill out the form below to contact our team, and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.