What is Voyant?
Voyant Tools (https://voyant-tools.org/) is a web-based reading and analysis environment for digital texts. The project is designed to facilitate reading and interpretive practices for students and scholars as well as for the general public.
Voyant is distinct from many text analysis tools in that it allows the user to experiment with different approaches to text analysis, both in terms of statistical and visual representations of corpora. Within Voyant you can work in a dashboard that shows a text or texts simultaneously in a number of tools, or you can choose a single tool to drill down in your analysis.
Voyant is dynamic and interactive, allowing the user to change the parameters of their queries of the text on the fly. Each change to a corpus, whether it be demonstrated within a particular tool or with particular adjustments to the corpus across tools, can be saved with a discrete URL that can then be shared with others. These other users can then pursue their own research. In this way Voyant challenges traditional criticisms of text analysis as being too obscure, with results appearing from a ‘black box’ that cannot be replicated. By contrast, Voyant is transparent about the ways in which the tools work, and what you get when you work with them. Further, Voyant views can also be embedded as dynamic graphs in web pages, making them more openly accessible.
Voyant is great for classroom use, because it is easy for students to quickly grasp the principles of text analysis without requiring them to have experience in statistics or coding languages. They also develop agency in terms of which tools align with their particular ways of ‘seeing’ texts.
Interested in learning more?
Who should I contact for help?
If you need assistance, feel free to reach out to Digital Pedagogy & Scholarship at dps@bucknell.edu.