CATMA is a practical and intuitive tool for literary scholars, students and other parties with an interest in text analysis and literary research. CATMA 3.2 is a JAVA based version for Mac and Windows PC and is available on this site for download. CATMA will eventually be implemented as a web service that can also be plugged into other existing frameworks.

Inspired by the well known program "Usebase" (from the TACT suite, a DOS based tool set developed at Toronto University) it provides a variety of tagging and analyzing functionalities contained in its two components: the Tagger and the Analyzer.

CATMA places a strong emphasis on usability and is designed for users with little experience in digital text analysis.

Unlike structural markup, which in most cases can be expressed by a more or less fixed tag set, a markup that interprets the meaning of textual elements - so-called "hermeneutical markup" - needs to be flexible and extensible, yet at the same time conform to relevant standards to enable tools interoperability.

CATMA is based on a "one-to-many" data model that meets these requirements and is designed to support what we call "collaborative markup": a mode of exploring texts that combines automated routines with multi-user manual tagging and analysis. All CATMA markup is stored in a stand-off manner which enables overlapping and contradictory markup, and it is stored separated from the object text to support the coexistence of markup for different purposes, or even the coexistence of conflicting markup for the same purpose.