By Ayushi Khemka, Geoffrey Rockwell and John Bradley
Digital notebook technology has become a significant feature of data-driven research over the past 10 or so years. Notebooks provide a way of combining displays arising from a digital data analysis with places where the researcher can comment on these displays. By combining digital displays with the creator’s commentary the notebook can record the thinking of its creator as s/he analyses their materials: they thus provide a mechanism that can capture the flow of the research as the user’s understanding of their materials increases. Because of this, notebooks (such as the Jupyter framework) has become very well established as a tool to support research and teaching in the data sciences.
Spyral is a relatively new addition to the Voyant software world. It is a notebook environment and (like established Notebook environments such as Jupyter) could be used for a broad range of digital research and teaching activities.
However, it is designed to integrate particularly well with Voyant and for this reason it is a natural extension as a new research tool for Voyant users. Unlike Jupyter, it requires no specialised setup on your computer: all you need is your browser.
To help Voyant users get started, we will offer a half-day Spyral workshop at the DH conference in Lisbon this year. As of yet, its exact time has not been scheduled, but we expect it will happen during the workshop phase of the DH 2025 Lisbon conference: some time on July 14th or 15th.
Sign up and come along to find out more about Spyral for Voyant! During the workshop you will be able to work with your own existing Voyant corpora or with a range of Voyant corpora that we will provide. You will thus get to see exactly how Spyral can enrich the research and learning experience Voyant gives to you and your students. Watch for it when you register for DH 2025.