The unusual nomenclature of this paper’s title is meant to draw attention to one of the conceptual features that has intrigued us the most in the development of the Text Analysis Portal for Research (TAPoR) : the simultaneous modularity and interdependence of the three substantives that describe our work of elaborating text analysis tools. To better understand what we are intuitively doing in developing the Portal (without always making our presuppositions explicit beforehand), and to imagine how the Portal can best fulfil its mandate as a workspace for scholars working with electronic texts and tools, we are motivated to examine text analysis tools both at the atomic and molecular level. Or, to return to the programming metaphor of the title, we wish to examine each object individually (Text, Analysis, Tools) and also as a composite object of objects (Text Analysis Tools).
 
  The ambiguity of the method define from the title (whether it applies to the individual objects iteratively or to the collection of objects) is deliberate. The pseudo-code of this paper is polymorphous: the process of defining (that constitutes the content of the paper itself) operates on different levels and on several types of objects. Furthermore, it should be noted that the use of unquoted, capitalized words for the objects to define is deliberate: as per object-oriented convention is, these represent classes of things rather than particular instances.  As such, we are not so much interested in, say, the use of tools to analyze a particular text, but rather, the particularities of texts in general as relevant to use of analysis tools. More pragmatically, we are interested in how the concepts that we take for granted in developing text analysis tools can in fact yield a rich array of useful design principles for the Portal, when examined more closely.
 
This paper is structured as a sequence of definitions of the relevant components in isolation, accompanied with - in increasing intensity - a discussion of how these component are transformed when combined with one another. In other words, text analysis tools are not merely  the amalgam of its constituent parts, but some class of object that extends beyond them. We will conclude by outlining some of the practical consequences that these reflections might have on the next phases of developing the TAPoR Portal.