Work in progress.

Most CATA relies on what has already been written, but incorporates new methods of "searching" a text. For example, instead of paging through a novel searching for every reference to a character, one could use a CATA tool to do the searching.

Of course, to search an online text, the text must first be online. Works that are in the public domain can be converted into an etext by just about anyone, but the big names are Project Gutenberg and Bartleby. The philosophy for these is that anyone anywhere with the Internet can easily access these books to read for fun or to do scholarly study.

E-text users can then search within the document by using their browsers find option (ctrl F for all the shortcut fiends) if they want to look for a specific word or reference in the text.

TACTweb 1.0 is a CATA program users can install. This type of software allows users to search on one or more words while looking for co-occurances. So, if you wanted to find a reference to "Caliban" and "mirror," that were within 10 words of each other, you could.

TACTweb and most other search tools for texts are based on searching for "key word in context" (KWIC). This is basically how Google results are displayed. The words surrounding your search term are displayed. Thus, if you were looking for the context of a quote, you might be in luck using Google.

However, there are specific search engines for certain texts, like Shakespeare and even certain American verse.

A lot of the ideas behind CATA came from concordances. Online concordances allow users to do many things:

Studies of rhyme patterns, verbal collocations, formulaic constructions, rhetorical patterns--the stylized use of words and phrases--can be readily carried out with a properly designed concordance. In addition, concordances can assist the identification and systematic study of a whole range of interrelationships between and among texts, from plagiarism to literary allusions and "echoes."

CATA is actually very useful, but I'll bet that most web users do some form of text analysis without even realizing it. For example, what do you do when you want to know who sings a song? I know I plug the annoying bit running through my head into a search engine and look for lyrics. However, it is very useful for close readings. Like close readings of the Tempest, for example...