What is Text Analysis? What did you see? What surprised you?
(Exercise adapted from Mackenzie Brooks ~Thank you!)
Objective: In anticipation of using voyant to conduct a text analysis on an object from one of the campus digital collections, let’s first practice with voyant tools!
Project Gutenberg: Visit Project Gutenberg and select a literary book you have read previously – whether in a high school or college course or on your own. Ideally, it should be a story that you know well and have immensely enjoyed. (Some personal favorites of mine available on the Project Gutenberg site include: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and Homer’s The Odyssey).
- Download the plain text version of the book/story you have selected.
- Upload the downloaded text file into voyant tools.
- Use the little window icon to change the tool being displayed in each window.
As you look through the various displays of your selected book, consider the following questions or prompts:
- Voyant offers many ways to visualize your select text—which method worked best for you?
- What are the most common and the least common words? Was this surprising?
- Search for a meaningful word in the “Trends” tool. How is this word used throughout your selected book?
- Were you able to identify the topics for your book? Which tool did you use to find the topics?
- Which tools helped you draw familiar as well as new and exciting connections between words?
- Is there a visualization that struck you as odd or curious, and thus not helpful?
- Please share which visualization was totally bizarre and a head scratcher, and explain why it is curious (and possibly not helpful) for you as an avid reader of this book?
- How do you export your results?
- Lastly, how can the voyant tool help you develop new questions with which you can analyze and re-discover a favorite book/story?
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