Voyant is an easy to use site that allows you to input a piece of text, either by copy and pasting or using a URL. Once the user inputs the text the site works to help them see patterns within the text. Two features that are very useful are the word frequency and the links between words. Voyant helps the user see how often a word is used and the relationship of that word to other words in the text. This helps historical analysis because it highlights words that appear often, which likely means that the word is important. Being able to see words that are important helps get people thinking about why that word is important to that piece of text. There are also may visual tools that allow users to see the relationships between words in many different forms.
There are word clouds, word bubbles, webs, graphs and many other ways of viewing the words. By providing many different was of viewing the text I think it will appeal to all different types of learners which makes this tool useful for everyone. Also being able to look at text in a form that is unconventional makes it more fun and engaging . If people are more engaged it will make the analysis of the words that are being highlighted by Voyant even better. Being able to see words in relation to one another gets people to think about and analyze the meaning of a piece of text. While Voyant does not think about the meaning for you it helps you look for patterns that will help you create historical meaning. Through traditional historical reading the historian would have to look for patterns on their own, often in a large body of text this is hard to do and it would be very time-consuming. Using Voyant as a tool to facilitate the analysis of a body of text gives historians the ability to quickly see patterns and begin analyzing rather than spending a large amount of time finding the patterns. I think that Voyant is a very useful tool that makes analyzing text fun and rewarding.
HIST2P26 