Voyant Tools
{{Short description|Open-source web application for text analysis}}
{{Infobox software
| title = Voyant Tools
| name = PAGENAME
| screenshot = Voyant Tools.png
| developer = Stéfan Sinclair & Geoffrey Rockwell
| released = 2003
| latest release version = 2.2
| repo = https://github.com/voyanttools/Voyant
| operating system = Cross-platform
| language count =10
| genre = Text analysis, statistical analysis, data mining
| licence = Web Application: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Code: GPL3
| website = http://voyant-tools.org
}}
Voyant Tools is an open-source, web-based application for performing text analysis. It supports scholarly reading and interpretation of texts or corpus, particularly by scholars in the digital humanities, but also by students and the general public. It can be used to analyze online texts or ones uploaded by users.{{Cite web|url=http://voyant-tools.org/docs/#!/guide/about|title=Voyant Tools Help|website=voyant-tools.org|access-date=2016-11-24}} Voyant has a large, international user base: in October 2016 alone, Voyant's main server had 81,686 page views originating from 156 countries, invoking the tool 1,173,252 times.{{Cite web|url=http://hermeneuti.ca/VoyantFacts|title=Voyant Facts|last1=Sinclair|first1=Stéfan|last2=Rockwell|first2=Geoffrey|date=2016|website=Hermeneuti.ca: Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities|publisher=Stéfan Sinclair & Geoffrey Rockwell|access-date=2016-12-20}}
Voyant "was conceived to enhance reading through lightweight text analytics such as word frequency lists, frequency distribution plots, and KWIC displays."{{Cite journal|last1=Klein|first1=Lauren F.|last2=Eisenstein|first2=Jacob|last3=Sun|first3=Iris|year=2015|title=Exploratory Thematic Analysis for Digitized Archival Collections|journal=Digital Scholarship in the Humanities|volume=30|issue=Supp. 1|pages=i138|doi=10.1093/llc/fqv052|doi-access=free}} Its interface is composed of panels which perform these varied analytical tasks. These panels can also be embedded in external web texts (e.g. a web article could include a Voyant panel that creates a word cloud from it). The book Hermeneutica: Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities demonstrates different approaches to text analysis using Voyant.{{Cite book|title=Hermeneutica: Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities.|last1=Rockwell|first1=Geoffrey|last2=Sinclair|first2=Stéfan|publisher=MIT Press|year=2016|isbn=9780262332057|location=Cambridge}}
History
Voyant Tools was developed by Stéfan Sinclair (McGill) and Geoffrey Rockwell (University of Alberta) and continues to be updated. It developed out of earlier text analysis tools including HyperPo, Taporware, and TACT. Contributors have included Andrew MacDonald, Cyril Briquet, Lisa Goddard, and Mark Turcato.
Range of Uses
Researchers have used Voyant Tools to analyze texts in a wide range of contexts including literature,{{Cite journal|last=Rambsy|first=Kenton|year=2016|title=Text-Mining Short Fiction by Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright using Voyant Tools|journal=CLA Journal|volume=59| issue = 3|pages=251–258}} language teaching,{{Cite journal|last=McIlroy|first=Tara|year=2013|title=Exploring Poetry and Identity in a Language Learning Environment|journal=Studies in Linguistics and Language Teaching|volume=24|pages=31–45}} healthcare,{{Cite journal|last1=De Caro|first1=W.|last2=Mitello|first2=L.|last3=Marucci|first3=A.R.|last4=Lancia|first4=L.|last5=Sansoni|first5=J.|year=2016|title=Textual Analysis and Data Mining: An Interpreting Research on Nursing|journal=Studies in Health Technology and Informatics|volume=225|pages=948|pmid=27332424}}{{Cite journal|last=Maramba|first=Inocencio Daniel|display-authors=etal|year=2015|title=Web-based textual analysis of free-text patient experience comments from a survey in primary care|journal=JMIR Medical Informatics|volume=3| issue = 2|pages=e20|doi=10.2196/medinform.3783|pmid=25947632|pmc=4439523 |doi-access=free }} and system architecture.{{Cite journal|last1=Moullec|first1=Marie-Lise|last2=Jankovic|first2=Marija|last3=Eckert|first3=Claudia|author3-link=Claudia Eckert (engineer)|year=2016|title=Selecting system architecture: What a single industrial experiment can tell us about the traps to avoid when choosing selection criteria|journal=System Architecture Design|volume=30|issue=3|pages=250–262}} Describing approaches to studying the internet using web scraping, Black has noted that "the Voyant Tools project is an excellent source to learn about the kinds of data that humanists can extract from Internet sources because it already supports text extraction from webpages."{{Cite journal|last=Black|first=Michael L.|year=2016|title=The World Wide Web as Complex Data Set: Expanding the Digital Humanities into the Twentieth Century and Beyond through Internet Research|journal=International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing|volume= 10|issue=1|page=106|doi=10.3366/ijhac.2016.0162}}
A number of international digital humanities projects are running Voyant on their own servers. These include the French [http://www.huma-num.fr/ Huma-Num] project, the Italian [http://www.ilc.cnr.it/ CNR ILC], and the German [https://de.dariah.eu/ DARIAH-DE] project.
External links
- [http://voyant-tools.org/ Voyant Tools]
- [https://github.com/voyanttools/Voyant Voyant Tools] repository on GitHub