An Introduction to Voyant and Textual Analysis
Mining Textual Data for Hidden Insights
Machine-assisted reading of textual materials sone of the many affordances offered by today’s digital tools. Using powerful text analysis tools on large and small corpora has revealed hidden insights and also allowed for collaborative interrogative of unstructured text to deduce machine-readable facts.
Increasingly scholars are employing tools such as Voyant in the Digital Humanities, but the application of textual analysis is far more broadly valuable and having awareness of its affordances will equip any scholar with an appreciation of when and how to apply these tools for your own investigation.
This informal seminar/discussion will introduce users to Voyant a very popular tool for introductory textual analysis that provides powerful statistical analytical capabilities along with engaging data visualisation to reveal hidden insights. Voyant is easily accessible and allows users to dig deeper as proficiency and requirements demand.
This session will combine hands-on exploration in Voyant along with discussion around text analysis concepts, terms and context.
No prior experience with these tools or in textual analysis is required and no advance preparation for this seminar is necessary.
Tutorial 1: An Intro to Voyant for Textual Analysis
Each of these tutorials provides steps and access to sample data for use during the workshop.
The presentation deck is also available.
There are a variety of other tools that may or may not be mentioned but are worth knowing about in the context of today’s discussion.
- TAPoR3
- Methodi.ca Methods Commons
- TAPoR Recipes
- Wordle
- Concordle (https://folk.uib.no/nfylk/concordle/)
- TextGrid
Additional sources of information about Voyant:
Additional Resources of Note:
- Hermeneuti.ca
- Mining Sermons on LIncoln’s Death – Great Applied Examples