Voyant Tools

Keywords: text analysis; text mining; distant reading

Description

Voyant Tools is a web-based analysis environment for digital texts in a variety of formats, including plain text, HTML, XML, PDF, RTF and MS Word. It can be used to perform lexical analyses, and includes tools for generating frequency distributions, key words in context, word distributions and collocates. Apart from the more traditional presentations of analysis results, Voyant offers many visualization tools. For detailed information on all available tools, see the tools index.

Instruction

A practical guide to text analysis with Voyant Tools: extensive online software manual. Here you will find help for getting started, more complete documentation for tools (including a collection of screencasts), useful resources (examples & workshops), and general information about Voyant Tools.

Voyant Tools Help: online help file, giving a quick overview of (the use of) all tools offered by Voyant.

Voyant Tools Tutorial by Tom Lynch. Video tutorial, giving a brief overview of how to use the software, illustrated by an analysis of the novel Moby Dick.

Availability

Voyant Tools is an open source web based service, to which you can upload the texts to be analyzed: http://voyant-tools.org/.

More information

Anderson, Alyssa. 2014. Using Voyant for Text Analysis. Digital History Methods, Rice University.
This article demonstrates the process of using Voyant for digital text mining.

Driedger, Mike. 2015. Reading John Taylor’s 1641 pamphlet using Voyant Tool. Amsterdamnified! A Research Project Website. Weblog.
Brief example of the use of Voyant Tools a an addition to the analysis of a text by close reading .