We recently took a deep dive into the research literature to update our Papers/Projects gallery — and what we found surprised even us. Voyant is being used in ways and places we had not imagined when we first began tracking this. Our gallery has grown from 26 to over 90 entries, spanning more than 10 languages and researchers from over 25 countries. This post is a reflection on what that research looks like, and an invitation to help us keep growing the picture.
A Tool That Travelled
When Voyant Tools was released, the hope was that it could lower the barrier to computational text analysis — making distant reading accessible to anyone with a browser and a corpus. What the gallery now shows is that this accessibility translated into something genuinely global.
The adoption timeline is striking. Growth accelerated sharply after 2019, peaked in 2021 with 23 published works in a single year, and has remained consistently active since. The 2020–2022 window alone accounts for more than half the gallery — a period that coincides, perhaps not coincidentally, with the global turn toward remote, digital-first research during the pandemic. And with entries already appearing in 2025 and 2026, the pace shows no sign of slowing.
The Range Is Remarkable
The disciplinary spread in the gallery tells its own story.
Historians are using Voyant to read sources at scale. Enrique Napoleón Urteaga Araujo applied it to a 19th-century Peruvian chronicle to analyze army composition during the Battle of Chupas. Julián David Cortés Sánchez mined the mission statements of universities across the world to trace how institutions present themselves in language. Julieta Yasmín Goldsmidt turned Voyant onto Argentine tango and rock lyrics, tracing how popular music reflects social identity.
Political scientists and discourse analysts have found it equally useful. Researchers have applied Voyant to tweets about the Kashmir conflict, to the inaugural speeches of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, to the rhetoric of populist leaders in Portugal, and to how Slovenian newspapers construct a narrative image of the United States.
In health and nursing, W. De Caro and colleagues used text mining to analyze nursing research discourse as early as 2016. During the pandemic, at least three separate teams reached for Voyant to analyze COVID-19 communication — studying newspaper coverage, social media health promotion in India, and Twitter conversations around the virus.
Legal scholars have experimented with it too: Helga María Lell asked Voyant to search Argentine court sentences for the word dignidad (dignity), examining what it means when legal language does or does not invoke human worth.
In ecology, Eville Gorham and Jon Kelly used it to trace 90 years of intellectual history through nothing but the titles of articles in the journal Ecology — watching how a field’s priorities shifted from 1925 to 2015 through the words it chose to name its work.
A Multilingual Tool in a Multilingual World
More than 44% of the gallery is published in a language other than English — and that figure is almost certainly an undercount. Research in Spanish alone accounts for 23 entries, Portuguese for 8, with Turkish, Japanese, Classical Chinese, Mandarin, Korean, Indonesian, French, and Italian also represented. What tends not to travel across linguistic borders is nonetheless happening, and it is substantial.
Brazilian scholars have built a particularly active community of practice. Researchers from UNICAMP, UFRGS, and other institutions are using Voyant to study information science literature, the materiality of books in Portuguese-language journals, and how to introduce students to linguistic research. Argentina’s Publicaciones de la Asociación Argentina de Humanidades Digitales (PublicAAHD) alone has published at least seven Voyant-based papers across its volumes.
In East Asia, Lu Wang used Voyant to analyse the Lienü zhuan (Biographies of Exemplary Women), a Classical Chinese dynastic text, tracing how the role of textile making is framed across centuries. James Harry Morris has written two guides to working with historical Japanese texts in Voyant, navigating the particular challenges of stopword lists and tokenization in pre-modern Japanese.
Elias Malete at the University of the Free State recently brought Voyant to bear on a Sesotho folktale, examining how oral literature can be analysed through the lens of Systemic Functional Linguistics — a reminder that computational text analysis is not limited to Western or print-based traditions.
And Then There’s Spyral
Alongside Voyant Tools, the gallery now includes work built around Spyral Notebooks — the programmable, notebook-based companion environment developed by the Voyant team. Geoffrey Rockwell, Kaylin Land, and colleagues have been publishing and presenting on Spyral since 2021, from its initial release to a hands-on workshop at DH2025 in Lisbon. If you are working with Voyant and want more programmatic control over your analysis pipeline, Spyral is the place to look.
Help Us Build a More Complete Picture
This gallery is not exhaustive — it cannot be. Research using Voyant appears in dozens of languages, across disciplinary silos that rarely talk to one another, in grey literature and institutional repositories that resist easy discovery. Special thanks to those who made submissions through the form we provided below. We now have 94 entries , and feel free to browse the full updated table here.
Have you published research using Voyant Tools or Spyral? Do you know of a paper, project, or teaching resource we should include?
We want to hear from you. Please submit your work (or work you admire) using the form below — it takes less than two minutes — and we will review and add it to the gallery.
Every entry in this gallery is a small act of evidence — evidence that computational text analysis belongs to everyone, that it is being done in Indonesian and Portuguese and Sesotho and Classical Chinese, that it is being applied to court decisions and folktales and ecological journals and tango lyrics. We would love to know what you are doing with it too.