Location: online

Faculty: Tim Dewysockie, Librarian Application Support Specialist

Learning objectives:

• Learn to prepare and upload text for analysis in Voyant Tools. 
• Learn fundamental text analysis concepts through instruction and hands-on practice with Voyant’s suite of tools.

Voyant Tools is a web-based, open-source platform for text analysis, or the computational analysis of text. Text analysis has a wide range of applications, but in humanities research–such as in literary studies and historical research–it can be used to explore research questions in novel ways through “distant reading”. Unlike close reading, or the human interpretation of small amounts of text, distant reading utilizes computers to identify patterns and trends in large amounts of text. For example, text analysis can be used to determine which words appear most frequently in texts (word frequency analysis), show how terms are used in different contexts (keywords in context), identify topics (topic modeling), and much more. Text analysis is one methodology in the field of digital humanities that augments traditional humanities scholarship by providing interpretive tools to work with text on a large scale, in ways that would otherwise be too labor-intensive. This session will cover how to prepare and upload text into Voyant for analysis, explore fundamental text analysis concepts through Voyant’s built-in tools, and prompt reflection on the potential benefits–as well as the pitfalls–of using digital humanities methodologies and tools to explore humanities research questions.

Skill levels for attendees: Little to no experience

Software requirements: None