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- | <li>Go to http:// | + | <li>Go to http://voyant-tools.org/</li> |
<li>Provide a URL or paste in some text.</li> | <li>Provide a URL or paste in some text.</li> | ||
<li>Explore the various options for viewing the text analysis results. | <li>Explore the various options for viewing the text analysis results. |
Contents |
Voyant (formerly Voyeur) is currently a beta release by Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell. Voyeur is the next generation in a series of text analysis tools that include HyperPo and Taporware. It provides tables and graphs related to word use across a single document or a collection. Voyeur adds, among other things, the ability to handle much larger files than the previous tools could.
http://voyeur.hermeneuti.ca/?corpus=humanist shows a collection consisting of the entire archive of the Humanist list. It takes only a few clicks of the mouse to see, for instance, that the word “information” saw a peak usage in 1998/9 and that this peak corresponds to a similar one for the word “humanities.”
There is a screencast explaining how to load texts here: http://hermeneuti.ca/sites/default/files/loading.mov
Another screencast explains some of the features available: http://hermeneuti.ca/sites/default/files/tools-overview.mov
It is important to remember that this is a beta release, which means that there will be bugs. Don’t trust everything you see without stopping to consider that it might be a mistake of some kind. As Stéfan says, “expect the unexpected.”
A document describing Cirrus, the word-cloud tool in the upper-left of Voyeur, is available here: http://entry.tapor.ca/?id=8
Voyeur is the product of Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell.
No papers have been published at this point, although the journal Literary and Linguistic Computing has published many articles that show the kind of work that is possible with a tool like Voyeur. Here is one example:
Fink, Peter. “The Evolution of Order in the Chapter Lengths of Trollope's Novels.” Literary & Linguistic Computing (21:3) Sep 2006, 275-282.