Part 4. Digital Tools Explained
4.4 Voyant Tools
What is Voyant Tools?
Voyant Tools is a web-based text reading and analysis application. The tool performs a range of functions to tabulate, analyze, and visualize texts. Created by Stéfan Sinclair, Geoffrey Rockwell, and their project team. Voyant Tools makes it possible to text mine or derive information about a single text or many different texts. Users on the site upload documents to Voyant Tools and receive information about word count, word usage patterns and percentages, language density, and collocates, to name only a few of the results that the application provides.
Voyant is designed to integrate into a collaborative research process, including the possibility of sharing corpora and embedding tools into web pages (as you might embed a video); overall, Voyant is ideal for combining digital tools and argumentation to produce scholarship.
Once you create a corpus you will arrive at the default “skin” or arrangement of tools (see below).
The various tools in the interface are designed to interact with one another. For instance, if you click on a word in Cirrus, you’ll see the Trends tool update with information about the selected work. Similarly, if you click on a node in the Trends tool the Contexts tool should update as well. Interactivity and navigation between the different scales of a corpus (from the macroscopic Cirrus overview to the microscopic individual word occurrences) are a key part of the design of Voyant Tools.
Additional tools are readily accessible by clicking the tabs in each tool pane. For instance, beside the Cirrus header label is the Corpus Terms label, clicking on the tab will switch the tool.
Getting Started Distant Reading Frederick Douglass
Why is Voyant useful for performing a distant read?
Voyant facilitates a reader’s ability to take a broad overview of a text. The manner in which the document is arranged is very important. Voyant lets you measure the use of specific words used over a corpus. It also takes account the most frequently used words and phrases. A key feature of Voyant is its collocates feature. This allows users to identify specific words and observe their connections with key terms. The tool can assist in the process of performing a broad analysis of the words and sentence usage in The Narrative. We can assess the text based on word usage.
In this example, let’s consider how we could use Voyant to text mine and explore one of the most well-known works in American and African American literature, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845).
When I load texts into Voyant, there are four general steps I take to get a general sense of the corpus.
- Take an overview of your corpus using the Summary and Documents tools
- Take account of the most frequently used words and see their distribution across the corpus using the Cirrus and Trends tools.
- Take account of key terms and how they are used most often in the corpus using the