My Experience with Voyant
Voyant provided me with a plethora of information about the diction in the corpus of text I provided. In this case I used my book of choice, The Art of Logical Thinking by William Walker Atkinson. My favorite feature of Voyant was the cirrus cloud after the editing of Stopwords. It shows the frequency of words throughout the book and honestly the generation it came up with did not surprise me but reinforced what I already suspected. The most common words came up as reasoning, general, and concept, which came as no surprise as the audience. I also enjoyed exploring the other tools that Voyant provides. I think the Mandala feature is a very intriguing concept but was unable to provide me with much information with the corpus that I provided the system.
I think that there is a connection to the article we read in this week’s Reading and Social Annotations assignment, Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities. Voyant is categorizing and analyzing data from the .txt files uploaded from our corpus of choice. It is taking data from this book, and creating additional data with it, creating graphs, charts, and connections for digital humanities scholars to use. The article describes tagging as a way to organize information to discover patterns that were previously unnoticed, Voyant does just that. Voyant produces visuals that compound data and allow scholars to easily make connections and recognize patterns.
I learned that there are so many patterns and connections that can be made through use of programs like Voyant to advance projects in Digital Humanities. Voyant offers plenty of tools for scholars to explore and I was able to extract information and patterns from the use of only a few of these. Scholars can also expand their research with use of alternate programs like Google Ngram, which I also briefly explored. It is important to have a general question when using these programs in order to properly exercise use of the tools. If you have a focus or topic in mind that you are trying to expand upon, programs like Voyant and Google Ngram can help tremendously. Voyant does not help readers when exploring topics that require human evaluation and conceptualization, it can only give you information directly from the data provided without additional thinking.
