Voyant Tools  is a web-based text reading and analysis environment designed to facilitate reading and interpretive practices for digital humanities and the public.  http://voyant-tools.org/docs/#!/guide/about

Voyant Tools is an entry point – software that allows you to do basic computer-assisted analysis of data.

Text or edited and prepared data can by studied and analyzed in new ways and ‘plotted’ so that it can be saved and shared with others.   Using Voyant allows others to explore your data through interactive panels that can be inserted into online publications and presentations.   Voyant can also be used as a development platform to design new forms of analysis and visualization.  The main visualizations are: word frequencies, word clouds and “distinctive words”.

I am also including a link to the scatterplot for this corpus.  Clicking on the “Analysis” option > Principal Component Analysis provides  further evidence of the significance of “race” as a feature of slave experience.   http://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=2d0c91a1da599627fea6d35d607795a0&view=scatterplot&stopList=keywords-96814a63d28a5e281f75e02c891dcdbe

The trends graph indicates the significance of location.

I found Voyant to be an interesting tool which will be of great use when texts are clearly comparative.  It is great for collating data!  It provides the ability to analyze text to see trends in language and usage.  The word cloud is interesting and illustrative.  In the Slave Narrative data set on which I was working the common words were Old (which I ignored as the subjects of the text were elderly), Come and Time.  Whereas I would have expected more direct slave references which were secondarily popular.  The nature of the documents (by state) also provided insight into regional variations, but also made me recognize the states from which the largest number of narratives was drawn, would bias the representations and conclusions.  Understanding the Data (Musher, The Other Slave Narratives) is critical to recognizing the significance of patterns.  Having a larger context besides the quantitative data is essential for interpretation.  Also it became evident as I was working with the Data, that my choices were subjective and these choices would also “skew” the results…my lack of technical prowess also would play a role in the accuracy or distortion of the results.

For the new user….agh!  I am sure this tool would be easy for humanists with digital strengths.  For the digitally challenged, it is probably pablum, and a good entry point to Digital Mining and Modeling tools…but we are entering a “Brave New World” where the faint hearted must learn to persevere.  I believe spending some time in the on-line guides would be very helpful.  I played around the examples and information on Voyant’s website, but before attempting a larger project – I would try to learn to manage and navigate the tool better.  Time being an issue, I could not do that.  My simple tasks became time consuming, because if I tried to backtrack or change some aspect of the data my progress was lost.  Trying to return to old screens or navigate between the tools was not as “friendly” as I hoped.  Transforming from a historian who uses traditional sources of evidence to build up thesis and wider connections – I miss the library shelf (Underwood, Theorizing Research Practices).   it is a dramatic change to reverse and drill down into the minutia of checked boxes, single characters and itemizing the search.   The good new is that when you get interesting graphs or can make unexpected connections and conclusions…ya feel great!

“Learning is not attained by chance it, it must be sought for with ardor and diligence.” Abigail Adams