1. How is Voyant different from using an AI service like Copilot or ChatGPT?
By Dr. Geoffrey Rockwell
There are a number of ways you can use an AI service like ChatGPT in text preparation, analysis and reporting. One way is to upload a text and ask it to analyze the text. You can then ask specific questions that Voyant would answer with a tool like “What are the high frequency content words?” ChatGPT 4o will then generate Python code, run it, and then summarize the results. You can thus get many of the results that Voyant provides if you know how to write the right questions and follow up with clarifications.
The difference then is partly one of the interface to interpretation. Voyant provides a Graphical User Interface where you can directly manipulate the representations of the text while the interface to ChatGPT is a dialogical or “chatty”. Neither is better, in fact we believe they nicely complement each other.
- Voyant is free to use and open. ChatGPT 4o is not. On the other hand ChatGPT is run by a well-funded company while Voyant is an academic project run on public infrastructure.
- Voyant is more interactive. You can click on terms and immediately see their distribution rather than asking questions over and over. On the other hand, ChatGPT allows you to have a dialogue with the LLM about the interpretation of the text. You can ask surprising questions and veer away from the text at hand.
- ChatGPT can generate narrative interpretations (as opposed to visualizations) that can be copied easily to your writing, though you may want to think about asking generative AI to write for you.
- Voyant presents you with tools based on methods that you might not think about or know how to ask ChatGPT for. It is a great way to explore computational ways of interpreting texts that you could then try asking ChatGPT for.
- ChatGPT generates code that you can learn from, review and reuse while Voyant hides its code. That said, the code generated by ChatGPT can fail or have flaws that may not be obvious if you don’t review the code.
- The two approaches can nicely complement each other. You can learn about text analysis with Voyant and then when you want to write your own code to get exactly the results you need, you can draw on ChatGPT as a pathway to advanced digital methods.