The 27th Biennial Conference of the Canadian Ethnic Studies Association, held from November 14–16 at the University of Alberta, featured an engaging Voyant Training Workshop. 
Led by Prof. Geoffrey Rockwell and his research team — Ayushi Khemka, Augustine Farinola, and Hannah Perry — the session offered hands-on learning opportunities for Bridging Divides researchers.
Practical Engagement with Voyant Tools
To make the session as interactive as possible, a specially prepared corpus was provided to participants. During the workshop, the team demonstrated how to use various Voyant Tools to explore and analyse texts. Tools covered included:
- Cirrus: A word cloud visualization tool that highlights frequently occurring words in the corpus.
- Trends: Graphs showing word occurrences over time or documents.
- Scatterplot: A visual tool to map word frequencies across documents.
- Topics: A tool for discovering themes within a corpus.
- WordTree: A dynamic way to explore word connections.
- Named Entities Recognition: A feature for identifying and visualising proper nouns and entities like names, places, or dates.
Participants followed along with live demonstrations, giving them the chance to see how these tools could be applied to their own research projects. The session ended with an open discussion, where attendees shared ideas for using Voyant in their respective domains.
Taking Voyant Tools Further with Spyral Notebooks
For those who are already familiar with Voyant, consider enhancing your experience by using the tools within a Spyral Notebook. These Notebooks combine text, code, and interactivity, offering a flexible environment to experiment with Voyant’s features.
Try it yourself: [https://voyant-tools.org/spyral/Sagaust@gh/7ww2Ct/]
This practice notebook shows how you can explore the same provided corpus using those listed Voyant Tools in Spyral. For feedback and further questions, feel free to reach out to the team on our LinkedIn Chat Room.