Vowel Analyzer

Vowel Analyzer is a small software to analyze vowel distribution in (old) Italian verse texts in TEI XML format. It can be used as console application or as a GUI application. The software has been developed mainly on Windows machines, so you might get the most reliable functionality using the application on a Windows machine.

Background

The software is the result of an introductory seminar to Python programming for philology students in summer 2023 at the institute for Italian philology at LMU Munich. At the end of this seminar, the idea of applying the new knowledge arose and Enrico Fantini, post doc researcher and participant of the seminar, and Sascha Resch, doctoral candidate and tutor of the Python seminar, decided to create a small application that aims to demonstrate what can be done after one semester of Python training. While Sascha Resch worked mainly on the GUI, the installer and the repository logic, Enrico Fantini developed the main logic of the application.

Installation/Prerequisities

In order to merely run Vowel Analyzer you have to install Python 3.9.7 on your machine (other versions might work but haven't been tested yet).

For Windows users: If you want (or need) to install Vowel Analyzer with a shortcut on your desktop, please perform the following steps:

• Download/Clone the source code
• Run install.ps1 - be aware that you have to run ps1-files by using a right-click and clicking 'Run with PowerShell'
• After the installation process you should see a shortcut on your desktop. By double-clicking the shortcut icon VowelAnalyzer should start in GUI mode

Special prerequisities for Mac M1 architecture

The Mac M1 architecture (released in 2020) requires special actions in order to make Vowel Analyzer work.

• In our test case it was necessary to install the needed libraries manually (so pip install -r requirements.txt didn't work)
• We had to install PyQt5 separately - this requires several actions using M1 architecture
  • Consider the following hints to install PyQt5 (Qt5 respectively) on your Mac: https://stackoverflow.com/a/76114212
  • You need to enable an Intel terminal using Rosetta (see the instructions here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/74531940), make sure you have Rosetta installed
  • Now you can open a terminal and type intel, to get an Intel terminal
  • In this Intel terminal you can install PyQt5 libraries using pip: pip install PyQt5 and pip install PyQtWebEngine

Usage

Using the application in GUI mode, you will see the following graphical interface:

• Click Select file to choose the TEI XML-file to be analyzed

• Click Run analysis to perform the vowel calculation for the chosen TEI XML-file

• You should see a similar output in the GUI:

• Activate Calculate percentages to get results as percentages, if not activated the absolute number of vowels will be displayed

• Click Export SVG to save the chart with results (displayed in the main view on the right side of the application) to any directory of your machine

• Click Legal notice to view information about the application and legal notices for libraries used

Roadmap

The following features are to be implemented in further versions of the software

• Improved support for Mac
• Support for Linux systems
• Error handling for malformed TEI-XML documents
• Error handling for other documents than TEI-XML documents
• Logging of errors and warnings
• Accept other texts than verse texts
• Accept texts in other languages with specific vowel settings (diacritics)
• Offer more types of charts to display the results
• Compare the results with standard distribution of vowels in a certain language
• Create deployment scripts for MacOS and Linux
• Upgrade to Python 3.11 or higher
• ...