Daniel Lugo
Voyant Tools is a text analysis platform used for patterns in large bodies of text. It can analyze word frequency and generate word clouds. For Digital Arts and Humanities specifically, Voyant is a really efficient way to explore themes or patterns in literature, speeches, or historical documents without needing to thoroughly read through these documents. If you wanted to analyze something like a book or speech, you can start by uploading the text file directly into Voyant. Once you choose your file, you press reveal. This gives you a word cloud, a bar graph, and other statistics. Here is a visual of my ownthat, I will provide an embed of my own using the The Analects of Confucius:
Once you’ve gotten to this point, there are a lot of points of customization available to you. The word cloud has a scroll at the bottom left that allows you to expand the amount of words in the vizual, it can give you up to 500 words. Now that you had the chance to play around with the word cloud you can change the entire visualization. If you hover your cursor by the question mark at the top right then you will see that a window option is revealed. Hover over this and it will give you a drop down of all the tools; from corpus tools, visualization tools, and even grid tools. One option under the corupus tools is the dream scape. I personally think this is one of the coolost options.Dream scape generates a map based off how many times a locaiton was said within the text; revealing how many times it was mentioned, and connections it has to other areas. Although this specific text doesn’t mention many locations this feature can reveal a lot about the geographical understanding of a book.
Another interesting feature that I think is worth playing with is the Constellations term analysis. This gives you a web like visual that identifys the relationships between these words. I like how you can literally move the webs to your liking and compare things side by side. Here is an embed of the feature:
If you would like to keep exploring the endless features on the website theres also a guide with explanations to every single visualizations here.