Text Analysis With Voyant 2.0

A few weeks ago, coincidentally during Day of DH 2016, it was brought to my attention that Voyant, a web-based text analysis tool, had upgraded to Version 2.0.

This has been a popular tool with ProfHackers (I’ve written about using it as has Brian), and the new version is a great improvement. The list of changes includes:

• a cleaner, crisper appearance

• better cross-platform and mobile device support (all tools in HTML5, no Flash or Java Applets)

• advanced search capabilities, including wildcards, phrases, and proximity queries

• a new tables/grids framework that allows for infinite scrolling (instead of the awkward paging and favorites from before)

• modifying a corpus adding and reordering documents

• new Phrases tool for analyzing repeating n-grams

• much better support for larger corpora

• vastly improved performance throughout (corpus reader and collocates are notable examples)

• built-in documentation for the current version

A huge shout-out to creators (and maintainers) Stéfan Sinclair (McGill University) and Geoffrey Rockwell (University of Alberta) for making a great tool even better. It works great for getting students started in large-scale text analysis. The documentation is stellar, and makes it easy for students (and professors) to get started, save, and embed their work. My favorite new tool is perhaps the “knots” tool:

so... how does one interpret the ‘knots’ tool in @VoyantTools ? pic.twitter.com/1qxl06FJoo

— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 20, 2016

(Follow the Tweet to find a fun little Easter Egg in Voyant.)

This follows the reboot of TAPoR in Version 3, which is a larger portal for discovering tools to do large-scale text analysis.

What tools are you using in the classroom to do these kinds of analyses?