Collation is the process of comparing different versions of a text to discover the location and type of textual variants. Collation is fundamental to a variety of scholarly pursuits, for example in the Arts and Humanities field it can be used for the accurate reconstruction of texts of classical works. In the past collation was performed by hand; today, it is performed with the assistance of a computer.

There are three methods for collating texts:

• Read two texts side by side and note the differences
• Compare printed page images
• Transcribe and compare transcriptions with aid of a computer.

Related methods include Content analysis, Stemmatics and Stylometrics.