Voyant-Tools text analysis software is a program that is used in order to find the key words and patterns in large bodies of text. It can also be used when trying to compare multiple texts to one another. The ability to use this and other text analysis applications greatly helps historical analysis as you don’t have to take the time to read the large texts and can quickly identify what they have in common with each other. When you feed the texts through the software the results you get back are very easy to interpret for anybody using the application. Another helpful thing about this program is that it is very easily accessible and free for anyone to use. It can be used in order to compare literally any two texts to each other and relate them no matter how little you may have previously thought they would have in common. Although it is a very helpful tool for all kinds of research there are also some drawbacks to it. To begin with, fact that all the outputs are just the raw words make it impossible to understand the context that the words are being used in. For example, you could be comparing two different texts that have almost the exact same words used at almost equal frequencies. Based on these results, you would assume that both texts would be about the exact same thing and have almost identical content, but due to the program not taking into account the context of the words used they could have completely separate meanings based on how they were used. There is also the problem of a lot of the top words the program finds being words with very little significance to the text but that still come up a lot such as the name of the author, the word ‘the,’ etc.
The use of text analyzation software can be extremely useful when used in the right contexts, it also has its fair share of downsides and shouldn’t be used as the only means of analyzation.
HIST2P26 