Almost everyone has read and analyzed a book, but many don’t know the various ways in which you can do so. Close and distant reading are two very useful ways in which to dissect a book or piece of writing.

Close reading is when you take out one or several passages from the reading to analyze. You then read it several time and annotate various portions that the author is describing or wants the reader to understand. This really shows the detail in the information that the author is laying out and that is easily missed by the reader on just a casual read.

Distant reading is when you look at the entire “picture” of the book. You dive into more of the general information about the novel such as word usage, and the connection between words and phrases. This helps the reader find the metaphorical character in the novel and what it is made up of. Distant reading can show what the author wants the reader take from the book on more of a surface level.

Voyant is a digital humanities tool that can help the reader use distant reading to visualize the novel in a different and interesting way. One useful piece of Voyant is the word cloud. This shows all of the most frequently used words throughout the novel. You can filter out words that aren’t important so that you get a better and more concrete visual. This goes in conjunction great with the links section which connects words to one another. This helps visualize how the author wants the reader to connect certain words and think about the meaning between each one. Maybe the most telling portion of Voyant is the trends visual. This is a graph that shows the usage of a word throughout the book by visualizing how many times it was used in each chapter. This really shows what the author was talking about at different points of the novel and how multiple words were used in conjunction with one another. It can also explain the importance of a word to a portion of the book and what was happening in that chapter.

Something that really stood out to me when I was playing around with Voyant using The Last Warner Woman was the the use of Ada, the Writer Man, and God. There is definitely a correlation between their usage and the narrative of the story. Ada is mostly used during her narration of the story and a little bit during the Writer Man’s narration drawing the focus to Ada herself. Man is used in large part during the Writer Man’s narration focusing more on him and his story. God is used heavily when Ada is at the Leper Colony, but is favored the most at the end of the novel when Ada is in the asylum and leaning most of God. This also really shows the relationship that Ada has with God throughout the novel and when she connects with him the most.

Voyant is a very useful digital tool to use distant reading and dive deep into the themes and connections in The Last Warner Woman.