computer science

Voyant Tools

Voyant Tools is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Voyant Tools rather than just read about it. In short: Voyant Tools is an open-source, web-based application for performing text analysis. It supports scholarly reading and interpretation of texts or corpus, particularly by scholars in the digital humanities, but also by students and the general public.

Key takeaways

Voyant Tools belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Voyant Tools to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Voyant Tools from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Voyant Tools is an open-source, web-based application for performing text analysis. It supports scholarly reading and interpretation of texts or corpus, particularly by scholars in the digital humanities, but also by students and the general public. It can be used to analyze online texts or ones uploaded by users. Voyant has a large, international user base: in October 2016 alone, Voyant's main server had 81,686 page views originating from 156 countries, invoking the tool 1,173,252 times. Voyant "was conceived to enhance reading through lightweight text analytics such as word frequency lists, frequency distribution plots, and KWIC displays." Its interface is composed of panels which perform these varied analytical tasks. These panels can be embedded in external web texts (e.g. a web article could include a Voyant panel that creates a word cloud from it). The book Hermeneutica: Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities demonstrates different approaches to text analysis using Voyant.

History Voyant Tools was developed by Stéfan Sinclair (McGill) and Geoffrey Rockwell (University of Alberta) and continues to be updated. It developed out of earlier text analysis tools including HyperPo, Taporware, and TACT. Contributors have included Andrew MacDonald, Cyril Briquet, Lisa Goddard, and Mark Turcato.

Range of uses Researchers have used Voyant Tools to analyze texts in a wide range of contexts including literature, language teaching, healthcare, and system architecture. Describing approaches to studying the internet using web scraping, Black has noted that "the Voyant Tools project is an excellent source to learn about the kinds of data that humanists can extract from Internet sources because it already supports text extraction from webpages." A number of international digital humanities projects are running Voyant on their own servers. These include the French Huma-Num project, the Italian CNR ILC, and the German DARIAH-DE project.

External links Voyant Tools Voyant Tools repository on GitHub

References

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Voyant Tools

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Voyant Tools claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Voyant Tools before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Voyant Tools ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Voyant Tools

In research: Voyant Tools appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Voyant Tools in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Voyant Tools is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Digital humanities, Free software projects, Textual scholarship, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Voyant Tools outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Voyant Tools in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Voyant Tools means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Voyant Tools out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Voyant Tools in simple terms?

Why does Voyant Tools matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Voyant Tools?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Voyant Tools.