The principle behind automated collation is that, given a set of texts that resemble each other, the programme will identify and align the matching words and phrases across all text witnesses. Depending upon the collation programme, the scholar might compare all texts to a selected base, or compare each text to every other text without reference to a base. Various tools offer different forms of visualization of the results—side-by-side comparison of two witnesses, a spreadsheet of all witnesses that can be downloaded and used as a more traditional collation table, or even a representation of the text as a graph, with text variants marked as divergent paths. The result can also be used in further analysis, for example in a programme that will compute a hypothesis (partial or full) for the stemma.