Analyzing texts with Voyant Tools

Getting familiar with Voyant

Voyant Tools is a web-based environment for text reading and analysis. It allows users to import a text or a corpus of texts in a variety of formats (plain text, HTML, XML, PDF, RTF, and MS Word) and use a suite of visualization tools (world clouds, collocates, bubblelines, repeating sequences) to analyze them. It is a browser-based multi-platform set of tools that is ideal for visual exploration and analysis of texts.

Voyant features a pretty comprehensive set of analysis and visualization tools. You can have a look here:
https://voyant-tools.org/docs/#!/guide/tools

Some of these tools are rather intuitive and can help us get an overview of the corpus or set of documents we want to explore. For example:

• Documents: a list of all documents imported
• Reader: a text viewer
• Contexts: shows "keywords in context"
• Cirrus: a world cloud tool

Other visulization tools provide more in-depth views and may fit certain methodological perspectives:

• Bubbelines: visualized the frequency and distribution of terms in a corpus
• Collocates graph: terms occuring in proximity represented as a force directed network
• Trends: shows the distribution of a word's occurence across a corpus. Similar to Google's ngram viewer. Useful for comparing the occurence of certain terms across a corpus.

Voyant supports document analysis in most languages and its interface is available in ten languages:
https://voyant-tools.org/docs/#!/guide/languages

There are a number of ways you can load text into the Voyant environment:

• copy-and-paste the text of a single document into Voyant's main text box
• copy-and-paste several URL's, one per line
• upload a local file from your computer
• load one of the existing sample text to test Voyant

Task: analyzing text from URLs

Copy-and-pase the following URLs from the Situationist International texts into Voyant's text box, one per line:

http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/fr/display/370
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/fr/display/74
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/fr/display/71

Click on "Reveal". The Voyant environment will generate a set of lists and visualization and should look like this:

Spend some time to get familiar with the Voyant environment and the available tools. Locate the most frequent words in the "Summary" frame. Switch to "Documents" to get an overview of the corpus. The "Cirrus" frame shows a word frequency cloud. You can change the word cloud by including/excluding documents in the corpus. You can also define stopwords from the "options" menu. The tab "Links" generates a graph of collocates: keywords (in orange) and term in proximity (blue). From the option menu select "choose another tool for this panel location" and then "Trends."

Choose up to 3 visualizations shown in different panel locations that you find interesting (or problematic) and use the export menu to save them as images.

Upload (or copy-and-paste using a screen grab tool) the images here.