By Ayushi Khemka
So, by now, perhaps you have seen what Voyant Tools looks like. You know it has a bunch of different tools. Some appeal more to your eyes than others. But you want to know more specifically how you can use it for your research. If you are new to Voyant and it seems like a tool that entices you but you find yourself stuck and overwhelmed by the number of tools it has to offer or even how to use them precisely for your research, you are not alone and many of us have been there and continue to be there. As a text-analysis tool, we suggest thinking of Voyant as a method which can help you enter into a dialogue with your text. You feed Voyant with your corpus, frame certain questions and/or hypotheses, explore them through the different tools and engage with the results you generate from Voyant.
For instance, think along the lines of:
- What is this corpus telling you about? Is it different from what you had expected?
- Does it highlight the topics you are interested in?
- How does the discourse change over the course of your text? (Hint: check out the Trends tool)
Now that you are thinking about these prompts, you might also want to check out a few examples of papers and projects that have used Voyant, for added inspiration!
This 2022 article by Roy et. al. uses Voyant Tools and topic modeling methods to interrogate the impact of government announcements on Twitter in India during the COVID-19 lockdown in the country. They employ a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to come to their findings. They use the Cirrus Tool and corpus summary provided by Voyant to engage with their corpus of Twitter data.
Did you know?
| Text analysis tools like Voyant have their roots in the tradition of creating concordances for important texts like the Bible or Shakespeare’s plays. Concordances were printed tools, similar to indexes, that allowed preachers or scholars to look up a specific word (e.g., “friendship”) and see all the instances of that word across the text. This enabled them to deeply explore the theme or concept and prepare a sermon or academic paper. With Voyant, you can now perform similar in-depth analyses on any electronic text. |
This paper by Yeh (2021) conducts a critical discourse analysis to investigate the surge of anti-Asian hate during COVID-19 and the response of Taiwanese students to it using Voyant Tools, among other methodological approaches. Specifically, they make use of the Cirrus tool, Collocates tool and Contexts tool to explore the word patterns and concordance data to determine their findings.
These two examples offer a glimpse into the whole array of tools that have been used by scholars recently. Check them out, look up more examples here on the Voyant Consortium and hit us up if you have any questions. We are always happy to chat!