TXM is a software platform offering textual corpora analysis tools and services. It is delivered as a standard desktop application for Windows, Mac and Linux and as a web portal server application (Heiden, 2010), < >.

TXM provides a consistent set of analysis tools combining qualitative (or close reading) tools such as word frequency lists, concordancing or text edition hypertextual navigation with synthetic quantitative (or distant reading) tools such as factorial analysis, clustering, keywords or co-occurrence statistical analysis.

To work on texts, the platform first imports the corpus sources to create a rich XML-TEI based internal pivot representation via the following general workflow:

From a methodological point of view:

Thus, so far TXM has implemented a traditional digital philology workflow combining an initial “text source encoding and annotation” step to a following “application of analysis tools on annotated texts” step. The text analysis tools use text annotations (for example word pos or some internal textual structure) to offer their services and produce their results (for example the frequency index of all infinitive verbs found in a section). The workflow is unidirectional and the whole of it must be passed through again completely if any annotation needs to be corrected. To add or correct annotations, the user has to edit the sources or the annotations outside of TXM. For example word properties can be exported from the XML-TEI TXM representation in a file in tabulated format, edited in a spreadsheet and injected back into the texts before re-import into TXM see for example this tutorial based on TXM macros: . .

This paper introduces new services developed in TXM to annotate directly texts from within the results view of specific tools for a better integration of philological and analytical work. Indeed, results views are great places to be aware of annotation errors or annotation needs, and to access what needs to be corrected or annotated.

The three new annotation services concern both adding and correcting information, and all the annotations edited are meant for further exploitation by usual TXM tools.

By using a common XML-TEI TXM pivot representation for internal management of corpora for all the annotation services, TXM unifies transcription, encoding and annotation activities in a single framework. In this framework, annotations can represent manual (user), semi-automatic (machine+user) or automatic (machine) interpretation results used further for analysis and interpretation work. The reflexive nature of the resulting text analysis workflow is schematized in figure 4. Texts are first digitized by OCR, transcribed or converted from digital formats. They are then possibly philologically corrected and established through XML-TEI manual encoding. Then automatically processed by NLP tools while being imported into TXM to produce the TXM internal corpus model. Corpus analysis is then assisted by TXM tools applied to the corpus model. The pivot representation that gathers all annotations produced by annotation tools is figured as the node labeled « Pivot rep. » and the interpretation workflow itself is figured as a digital hermeneutic circle.

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All the new annotation services integrated into TXM are building a comprehensive annotation-based digital text corpora analysis platform. From an epistemological point of view, the integration in TEI of the different annotation models and tools into the platform helps its users to better define and trace what comes from the source corpus they analyze and what comes from their own or from others interpretation work.

This work was funded by the ANR and the DFG under grant numbers ANR-15-CE38-0008 (DEMOCRAT project) and ANR-14-FRAL-0006 (PaLaFra project).