This week I had the opportunity to explore voyant tools, as it has evolved to a crucial tool for digital historians. Voyant tools can be identified by website based text reading and analysis environment that is designed to make it more easy for individuals to work with text collections in a variety of different formats. Simply this online tool will allow users to copy and paste there text or URL address into a text box, from there the website will transform the data to the credentials you have chosen. The formats that content can be transferred to includes formats such as, HTML, PDF, RTF, and Microsoft Work witch will ultimately provide historians the insight regarding patterns and unusual behaviour.
Furthermore voyant tools and digital text analysis platforms also provide visuals such as graphs, scatterplots and a variety of maps that are used for better understand of the information provided. It is critical in this era of technological advancements and globalization to understand the ability of voyant tools and how they quickly analyze patterns in large bodies of text or possibly hinder the historical analysis. The digital text analysis platforms such as voyant tools can be used for both uses, although it is based on what the historian is preparing to analyze. However voyant tools may not be as effective when the length of the content is not long enough, although I could see myself as well as many of my peers using voyant tools to analyze essays specifically looking for repetitive words and occurring speech patterns.
The evolution of voyant tools has evolved the analysis of traditional historical reading skills as it has become very beneficial for digital historians to participate with the new online platforms. The development of the new platforms have allowed historians to now view trends that have never been seenbefore, as well its also allowing the ability to specifically search for keywords in a large media archives.
Therefore in conclusion the innovation of voyant tools and digital text analysis will continue to allow individuals to easily and effectively view patterns within media content as well as also predict possible trends rather than the traditional concepts which were considered more time consuming and inaccurate.
Mitchell Witherspoon : November 23, 2017
HIST2P26 