BRAT Rapid Annotation Tool

Abstract

In the context of interdisciplinary collaboration, especially with colleagues from computer science, communication and media research has for some time been confronted with a wide range of research software with which it has had little prior experience. In addition to programming languages such as Python or R, these include specific tools for text analysis that represent an alternative to previous variants of computer-assisted content analysis. With the brat rapid annotation tool (BRAT) we present such an alternative in this paper and review it against the background of our experience in using it. BRAT is a web-based open-source text annotation tool that was developed by an international team of computer scientists about ten years ago. The article introduces the tool and its most important features, presents examples for its use in qualitative and quantitative content analyses on the basis of three case studies, and finally evaluates it with regard to potentials and difficulties for the field.