Mapping a Text Using Voyant
Written by Victoria Morse. Edited by Alan Zheng. Reviewed by Austin Mason and Aaron Young
Introduction
What would happen if you mapped the places from the long text or group of texts you are working with? Is it worth pursuing a geospatial approach? This recipe tells you how to throw a big text into Voyant and have it generate a map of the places, just to see what it might look like.
Voyant describes itself as a “web-based reading and analysis environment for digital texts.” It offers a number of visualization tools, including Dreamscape, “an experimental tool for exploring geospatial aspects of texts.” This recipe gets you started using the Dreamscape tool.
The information on Dreamscape comes with warnings not to trust the data. Serious geospatial results would require a lot of “cleaning” or preparatory work on the text you want to study. The following recipe is about throwing some text into the tool to see what happens as a quick way to find out whether mapping is a useful way to look at a large text. If it seems helpful, I suspect that you would want to move to a different tool that gave you more control.
Ingredients
A digital text or corpus of texts [see digital texts page] in a language that Voyant supports
Time! [the tool is slow]. There does not appear to be a % complete or other counter to tell you how much longer it will take to complete.
Note that you can return to your work if you use the bookmark feature to create a URL; be aware that Voyant says that your work “generally speaking” remains accessible if you access it once a month.
A tutorial on using Voyant is available
How to do it
Go to Voyant’s main page and upload a digital text following the instructions in the box.
Click “reveal”
The default view offers you different “panes” showing results from different Voyant tools.
You will need to hover on the upper right of a pane to see the controls, including a window pane icon with a text description “click to choose another tool for this panel location.” Click that.
From the menu, choose Visualization Tools => Dreamscape
You will see a watercolor basemap and places will begin to load.
Explore the Display menu at the bottom to change base maps, projections and other features.
Example Map
How it works
A detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section, so we are not perpetuating technology "black boxes" but helping people understand how to take control.
This section can include code snippets of CSS, JavaScript, Python, etc.
as appropriate
Further Resources
This section can be used to give additional information to make the reader more knowledgeable about specific aspects of the recipe, or provide helpful links to other useful information.
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