If you’ve ever opened Voyant Tools for the first time and wondered where to start, you are not alone — and it turns out, you have options in more languages than you might expect. We just finished a deep dive into the teaching and learning resources built around Voyant and Spyral, and the result is a dramatically expanded Instructional Materials gallery: from 18 entries to well over 100, spanning more than a dozen languages and every format from five-minute YouTube explainers to full university course modules.
A Tool Taught the World Over
What stood out most in this research wasn’t just the volume of material, but where it came from. Library guides at Duke, Oxford, Penn, Galway, Oslo, Aarhus, and a dozen other universities have quietly built their own Voyant walkthroughs for their students. Programming Historian has lessons in both English and Spanish. The Voyant team itself maintains Dialogica and the Spyral ALTA and LearnSpyral tutorial series for anyone who wants to move from clicking through the interface to scripting their own analysis.
Workshops have sprung up everywhere too — DHSI’s recurring course on Voyant and Spyral, McMaster’s self-paced online module, Toronto Metropolitan University’s Bridging Divides training series, and CLARIN/DARIAH-affiliated sessions across Europe. Text analysis with Voyant is clearly being taught as much as it’s being practiced.
Beyond English
Just as with our Papers/Projects gallery, the multilingual reach here is the real story. There are guides and videos in French (from Aurélien Berra’s long-running GitHub tutorials to Sciences Po’s médialab and several Quebec and Swiss university resources), German (the forTEXT project alone hosts five separate Voyant learning units, including one designed specifically for secondary-school classrooms), Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Greek, Swedish, Turkish, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. Some of these are polished institutional guides; others are a single generous person on YouTube walking through their own workflow in their own language because nothing else existed yet.
That last category is exactly why this gallery matters, and exactly why we rely on people like you to help us find what we’d otherwise miss.
Thank You to Our Contributors
Two submissions came to us directly through the Voyant community and are now part of the collection:
Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza shared Voyant & Retórica Digital do EMAPS, a series of interactive and written lessons in Portuguese that includes dedicated Spyral Notebook instruction — a genuinely rare resource for Portuguese-speaking learners.
Francisco Gago-Jover contributed Manual Voyant Tools, a thorough Spanish-language guide covering installation, the interface, and the full range of Voyant’s tools, built for learners at every level.
Thank you both for taking the time to share what you built. Resources like these are exactly what makes a tool usable beyond the communities that first created it.
Help Us Keep This List Growing
This gallery, like our Papers/Projects collection, can never really be finished. New courses get taught, new guides get written, and new videos go up every semester — often in languages or institutions we’d never think to search. If you’ve written a tutorial, recorded a walkthrough, built a course module, or simply found a resource that helped you learn Voyant or Spyral, we want to know about it.
Have you created or found an instructional resource for Voyant Tools or Spyral? Help us add it to the gallery.
Submit an Instructional Material
Whether it’s a five-minute screencast or a full semester’s worth of lesson plans, whether it’s in English or any of the dozen other languages already represented here — submit it, and we’ll add it to the gallery for the next person trying to find their way in.
The Instructional Materials gallery is maintained by the Voyant Consortium community. Browse the full updated table here.