Voyant Tools

Written by Andrew McSorley. Edited by Alan Zheng. Reviewed by Austin Mason and Aaron Young

Introduction

Voyant allows the user to quickly visualize a corpus. This tool will be most useful when a quick analysis of text(s) is needed in order to determine whether or not the text(s) offer enough suitable information for a GIS visualization. The hope is that Voyant can serve as a litmus test for viability before engaging in a mapping project. This tool can be used to detect phrases of movement within a text, instances of place names, or other instances of place-based language, from the literal to the poetic.

Ingredients

Voyant Tools is a free and open-access web-based program. All you need is a text and an internet connection.

Begin here: https://voyant-tools.org/

For information on what file formats play best with Voyant, and a general help, see here: https://voyant-tools.org/docs/#!/guide/corpuscreator-section-input-format

How to do it

1. Start by finding the text(s) you would like to analyze!

   1. [link up to a finding sources recipe?] [No such thing yet]

   2. You can go to Project Gutenberg to search and select a text. https://www.gutenberg.org

2. Upload a file or insert full text in the “Add Texts” box.

2. Voyant automatically generates an interactive reader, word cloud, and trend graph on the next page. Isolate particular terms by clicking on them within the word cloud, or click on the “terms” header to view the most commonly occurring words within the corpus.

3. Select “correlations” in the bottom right to see connections between particular words/phrases in the text.

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4. Hover in the grey space in order to access additional menu options and preferences to set stop words and create new visualizations of the text.

5. One of these visualization tools is “Dreamscape.” This should automatically locate geographical points from the text and map it in the visualization window using Open Street Map (https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=4/38.01/-95.84) as the base map layer.

CAUTION: I have had difficulty in the past making Dreamscape work for texts with more than a few locations. Your mileage may vary!

6. For a full help guide, see here: https://voyant-tools.org/docs/#!/guide/start

How it works

Voyant is web-based and open source. Code is available on GitHub. https://github.com/sgsinclair/Voyant

Further Resources

Here is a good example of an interactive map built from text analysis data:

http://language.mappingtexts.org/