<p><strong><em>Principle Components Analysis (Beta)</em></strong> is a free, web-based tool designed to run in a browser window. It is easy to use, designed <strong>generate relationships</strong> between words and text units in a user-specified plain text document, either hosted at a web address or uploaded from the user's files. The relationships are <strong>visualized</strong> in a <strong>Java applet</strong> that places words on an interactive <strong>scatter plot</strong>.</p> <p>To display the applet, users must have Java 1.4.2_8 or later installed for their browser. In order to have the applet display in a separate tab or browser window, users must also tell their browser&rsquo;s pop-up blocker to permit popups from the TAPoR website. The tool can handle novel-length texts, though the tool&rsquo;s processing will slow proportional to the size of the text. A number of <strong>options</strong> are available for interacting with the graph, including zoom, rotate, pan and changing the view axis.</p> <p>Users may specify a number of <strong>restrictions</strong> to limit the list. The subtext options allow one to break the text into paragraphs, by percentage or into chunks by number of words. The words themselves may be limited by the number of the highest frequency words to appear, and by whether or not to exclude words according to either the Glasgow <strong>stop list</strong> or a user-specified list.</p> <p>In addition to the Java applet, the tool&rsquo;s <strong>results</strong> can be displayed as an HTML table or as tab delimited text. The tool gives best results for documents over 500 words and a number of text units below 100.</p> <p>This tool currently has a few minor <strong>problems</strong>. When identifying words, it tends to include punctuation such as quotation marks, and opening quotes are appended to the word they appear adjacent to. The Java applet is sensitive to the volume of other traffic on the user&rsquo;s network and its processing may be slowed or it may fail to load when traffic is heavy. If it fails to load, refreshing the page or resubmitting the tool will generally resolve the issue. In addition, while it will accept HTML and XML documents, it strips all tagging and processes it as if it were plain text.</p> <p><strong><em>Despite these limitations, Principal Components Analysis (Beta) is an interesting, interactive way to view the distribution of the top words in a document.</em></strong></p>