Voyant Tools

Voyant Tools
Developer(s)Stéfan Sinclair & Geoffrey Rockwell
Initial release2003
Stable release
2.2
Repositoryhttps://github.com/voyanttools/Voyant
Operating systemCross-platform
Available in10 languages
TypeText analysis, statistical analysis, data mining
LicenceWeb Application: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Code: GPL3
Websitehttp://voyant-tools.org

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, but also by students and the general public. It can be used to analyze online texts or ones uploaded by users.[1] 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.[2]

Voyant "was conceived to enhance reading through lightweight text analytics such as word frequency lists, frequency distribution plots, and KWIC displays."[3] 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.[4]

  1. ^ "Voyant Tools Help". voyant-tools.org. Retrieved 2016-11-24.
  2. ^ Sinclair, Stéfan; Rockwell, Geoffrey (2016). "Voyant Facts". Hermeneuti.ca: Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities. Stéfan Sinclair & Geoffrey Rockwell. Retrieved 2016-12-20.
  3. ^ Klein, Lauren F.; Eisenstein, Jacob; Sun, Iris (2015). "Exploratory Thematic Analysis for Digitized Archival Collections". Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. 30 (Supp. 1): i138. doi:10.1093/llc/fqv052.
  4. ^ Rockwell, Geoffrey; Sinclair, Stéfan (2016). Hermeneutica: Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities. Cambridge: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262332057.