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 Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or Information technology, digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanitie ...

, 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 also 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 McGill is a surname of Scottish and Irish origin, from which the names of many places and organizations are derived. It may refer to: People * McGill (surname) (including a list of individuals with the surname) * McGill family (Monrovia), a promin ...

) and Geoffrey Rockwell (

University of Alberta The University of Alberta, also known as U of A or UAlberta, is a Public university, public research university located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. It was founded in 1908 by Alexander Cameron Rutherford,"A Gentleman of Strathcona – Alexande ...

) 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 Frenc
Huma-Num
project, the Italia
CNR ILC
and the Germa
DARIAH-DE
project.

External links

Voyant Tools

Voyant Tools
repository on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continu ...

References

{{Reflist Digital humanities Free software projects Textual scholarship