Teaching Tips & Tools: Voyant Tools
Spring 2015
By Emily Fenster, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Social Science Dept.
What is Voyant Tools?
Voyant Tools is a free web-based text analysis tool. Initially created for and used by individuals in the digital
humanities, it is now recognized as an approachable resource to explore language-related trends in a variety
of sources (e.g., poetry, plays, books, and transcribed conversations or media).
How to Access Voyant Tools
Main site (where you upload documents and add text): http://voyant-tools.org/
Help guide: http://docs.voyant-tools.org/
How to use Voyant Tools
The screenshot above is what you see when you first go to the website. This is where you upload your files,
paste your copied text or URLs, or access their Shakespeare files. To upload files, click “Upload” to select your
files. Click “Add” to upload each file, and click “Reveal” when you’re done. To use their Shakespeare files, click
“Open,” then select “Shakespeare’s Plays” from the drop-down menu, then click “OK.” The interface, called
the Corpus, will now load, and it will look similar to the screenshot below:
The basic tools that appear in the Corpus are the Cirrus, which creates a word cloud based on all text in your
files, the Corpus Reader, which shows the actual text in the files, and the Summary. The summary highlights
the following: word total, number of unique words, length of documents, vocabulary density of documents,
most frequently used words, frequency trends between documents, and distinctive words for each document.
The area below the summary highlights the most frequently used words in all of your documents, and also
provides a nice overview of usage throughout the documents.
Other information:
It allows for analysis in the following resources and formats: copied and pasted text, text via URLs,
HTML, XML, PDF, RTF, and Word.
If analyzing multiple sources, I suggest putting each into a separate file. This allows for more
straightforward comparisons.
You have the ability to export your data into a URL to access at a later time or share with others.
Otherwise, you can just upload your files again anytime you want to use Voyant Tools.
The help guide is very informative. Beyond providing guidance on how to use Voyant Tools, it goes into
detail on other tools you can put into the interface for analysis.
Ways to Use Voyant Tools in the Classroom
Use it to introduce students to basic text analysis approaches and web-based analysis programs.
Have students do more in-depth analysis of widely accessible literature and documents.
Beyond various forms of literature, use it to compare language trends between multiple conversations
and/or interviews.
Create different kinds of figures for your text-based data to highlight particular word frequency trends.
In online or face-to-face classes, the ability to export data means you can share with others and receive
assistance from instructors with greater ease.
Conclusion
Voyant Tools is free and accessible via the Internet, so it is easy to understand why this text analysis resource
is becoming more popular. Since it is an approachable example of analysis software, both students and faculty
can find interesting ways to “play” with text-based data.
Sinclair, Stéfan, Geoffrey Rockwell and the Voyant Tools Team. 2012. Voyant Tools (web application).