Looking for Stellar Dictation Software For MacBook Air

May 13, 2022 6:48 PM

I have 30-40 dream journals I would like to put in chronological order for an art project. Looking for recommendations. Also, is there software that goes above and beyond basic tools like "word-count", etc., I would also like to track such things as how many times a certain letter and word was used, cross-reference dreams with specific characters or dreams had on a certain day over 35 years.
posted by goalyeehah to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Are these written text or in machine readable form? If the latter, you could easily do any of these analysis—and more—in python or R.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:16 AM on May 14, 2022

Depending on the format, you might be able to use software that does corpus analysis and concordancing. I haven't used these, but I've talked to researchers who use something like AntConc and related tools and they can do the kind of analysis you're looking for. https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software.html
posted by ralan at 10:47 AM on May 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

Siri and macOS accessibility tools should be able to take dictation or recorded speech and give you text. Dragon Naturally Speaking was the gold standard for a long while, and Mefites who regularly use text-to-speech will have better suggestions.

For the corpus, look for word-cloud software. I think the industrial tools are ElasticSearch, LogStash and Kibana (the ELK stack) which you can run on your Mac or you can lease servers in the cloud and do the same work with AWS OpenSearch.
posted by k3ninho at 12:13 PM on May 14, 2022

If I guess right that these are handwritten and you’re hoping to use speech-to-text to produce files you can analyze, I would look through that amazing body of tools ralan linked and check out what format it expects. Then it should be easier to create your corpus in the way that’s easy to analyze. File names, date format, header lines, directory structure, do a little test with a handful of data first.
posted by clew at 1:01 PM on May 14, 2022