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Text Analysis

Using text analysis you can create word clouds, do proximity searches, and show frequency of a word across data.

How Do I Get Started?

To begin working with Voyant, gather the text you want to analyze. Once you have your texts gathered, go to voyant-tools.org.


1) You can either use full plain text that has been copied and pasted into Voyant or provide URLs to web pages that use plain text. Copy and paste your text into the "Add Texts" field.

2) Click on "Reveal" to launch Voyant.

Alternatively, you can open an existing corpus, or upload your own document from your local computer:

1) Click on "Open" to choose an existing corpus. Or, select "Upload" to select and search for the text document you want to analyze. The formats can include plain text, HTML, XML, PDF, RTF, and MS Word (.doc, .docx).

2) Click on "Reveal" to launch Voyant.

Source: Voyant Tools Documentation: Getting Started & Voyant Tools Documentation: Standard UI Elements

Top Pane Features:

  • Cirrus: A word cloud that displays the highest frequency terms – the larger the term, the more frequent it is (you can hover over words to see their frequency and click on them to see additional information).
  • Stopwords: A set of words that should be excluded from the results of a tool. You can add or remove the words in one of the existing list or start your own. To find this option hover on top right corner of box and select toggle "Define options for this tool".
  • Reader: Allows you to read the text(s) in the collection – more text will appear as you scroll. You can hover over words to view their frequency and click on terms to see more information.
  • Trends: Distribution graphs of words over a document or more.

Bottom Pane Features:

  • Summary: Provides some basic information about the text(s) in the collection, including the number of words, the length of documents, vocabulary density, and distinctive words for each document.
  • Contexts: Shows each occurrence of a keyword with a bit of surrounding text (the context). It can be useful for studying more closely how terms are used in different contexts.

Source: Voyant Tools Documentation: Getting Started & Voyant Tools Documentation: Standard UI Elements

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