Voyant in TextGrid
Voyant Tools aims to provide web-based access to collections of texts for exploration and analysis.
The service Voyant in Textgrid allows users to do quantitative analyses of the Digital Library and other projects, directly in the TextGrid Repository.
Analyzing individual texts in TextGrid
When displaying a text in the TextGrid Repository, the menu on the left lists Voyant under the tools category.
Clicking "Voyant" will load the selected text in Voyant
Analysis of text collections (corpora) from TextGrid
Not only single texts but complete corpora (text collections) can be transferred directly from TextGrid Repository to Voyant. In the TextGrid Repository, several texts can be added to a shelf to create a corpus that is adapted to your own research question. This shelf also offers the option to analyze directly with Voyant Tools. For example, you can add 12 dramatic texts by Friedrich Schiller to a shelf and then have this collection analyzed as a whole by Voyant:
To find out more about the functionality of the "shelf" option, read more here.
Added value of integrating Voyant into TextGrid
The integration enables the use of Voyant without any previous knowledge. This means that users do not have to deal with document management. Specifically, this means: You do not need to download the texts from the TextGrid Repository, save them on your own device and then upload them again in Voyant. This service is particularly aimed at learners and teachers from linguistics and literary studies who want to get started with quantitative analysis within the text collections of the TextGrid Repository, such as the digital library. For example, teachers can send the link to Voyant Tools, created via TextGridRep and containing a specific text collection, directly to the students.
Other functionalities from Voyant
Voyant in TextGrid shows word frequencies and distributions for selected texts and allows to easily explore and visualize properties of the selected texts. This enables stylistic features such as the use of words in opposite contexts, word clusters at characteristic points in the overall body or in the individual text, to be recognized and displayed at a glance. In the context of literary studies analyzes to support the interpretation from close reading, this can be the impetus to look at one or many texts from a different quantitative perspective.
Further examples
- Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years, or The Renunciations by Johann Wolfgang Goethe (in German), in Voyant
- The Sandman by E. T. A. Hoffmann (in German), in Voyant
- Journey around the world in 80 days by Jules Verne (in German), in Voyant
- Macbeth by William Shakespeare (in German), in Voyant
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (in German), in Voyant
- The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (in German), in Voyant
- La Celestina (Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea) by Fernando de Rojas (in Spanish), in Voyant
For the selection of texts it is advisable to take a look at the contents of the TextGridRep, which can be filtered by author, by genre, by file type and by project.
Credit
Further documentation and tutorials
- Voyant Tools documentation
- Tutorial written by the developer of Voyant
- Introductory video about Voyant by forTEXT & CATMA (in German)
- Gutierrez de la Torre, Silvia. “Análisis de corpus with Voyant Tools.” The Programming Historian en español, no.3. (In Spanish).
Integration of the tool in TextGrid
TextGrid uses an instance of Voyant Tools that can be accessed directly from the TextGridRep website.
Further questions?
If you have any further questions about the integration of Voyant and TextGrid, please contact us.