This week, I learned how to use Voyant, a digital tool for text analysis. Voyant is easy to begin using. It operates quickly and has relatively simple controls. Compared with Gale Digital Scholar Lab, it analyzes text quicker and presents its analysis in a variety of ways at the same time. Voyant makes it very easy to upload a text because there are a variety of ways to access texts, including from a URL or a file saved on your device. One tricky thing is that sometimes to upload multiple files into a corpus, as Voyant calls it, you have to hold the Control key. Voyant wouldn’t let me upload the ZIP file of the text I was going to analyze, so I had to select the texts individually.
Both Voyant and Gale Digital Scholar show word frequencies and trends. They can both show which words frequently appear together. Gale Digital Scholar has a wider variety of tools available than Voyant, but these tools take longer to run. Voyant also displays all five of its tools on the same screen. Selecting a word in one of the tools will change the displays in other tools. I prefer working with Voyant because it is simpler to use. I would prefer Gale Digital Scholar if I was looking for one specific feature in a text, if I wanted to customize the tools output, or use more specialized tools. Voyant is a good place to start with text analysis.
