The “Trends” tab offered to users by Voyant documents the frequency of words used by F. Scott Fitzgerald in his novel The Great Gatsby in each of the book’s ten segments. Three of Fitzgerald’s most commonly used words are the proper nouns Daisy, Gatsby, and Tom. Because the character Nick narrates The Great Gatsby, users can utilize the “Trend” tab to record the narrator’s relationship with each character as Tom is the most common word in the first, second, seventh, and eighth sections of the novel. Gatsby is the most common word in the third, fifth, and sixth segments. Readers familiar with Fitzgerald’s opus will know that Nick’s relationship with Gatsby and Tom fluctuates as both men simultaneously vie for the approval of both him and his cousin Daisy. The word used most frequently by Fitzgerald is “said.”
Interestingly, most writing courses discourage using “said” in favor of more inventive vocalizing verbs. Voyant states that 0.122 is The Great Gatsby’s vocabulary density. With what literary works is Voyant comparing Fitzgerald’s vocabulary? What does the 0.122 value mean in terms of creativity in the form of vocabulary?
If users click on the Windows icon located in the right-hand corner of Voyant’s interface, a drop-down menu will appear with an option for “Corpus Tools.” You can find a list of topics featured in The Great Gatsby after clicking on “Topics” at the bottom of a second drop-down menu. However, the topics promoted by Voyant are incoherent sentences that nonsensically string together popular words and phrases used by Fitzgerald throughout the novel. To export the results of Voyant’s corpus for Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, users need only click on the arrow icon, also featured on the top right corner of Voyant’s interface.
The “TrendBerry” tool is helpful in that it can recount words associated with the novel’s “top terms” and those accompanying “distinct terms.” For instance, “Gatsby” (which appears 197 times in the text) is linked most commonly to “Daisy” (7 times) and the character’s famous nickname for Nick, “sport” (6 times). The “TrendBerry” tool and the “Links” tool provide a count as to the number of times Fitzgerald pairs specific words together with another. However, there is a section within the “Links” tab titled “Relative” that communicates to Voyant users “the relative frequency (per million) of [each] term in each document.” It is unclear as to what other documents the tool is referring to. Does the “Relative” tab account for only online forms of Fitzgerald’s work or process the data based on the number of books published/sold in both a physical and virtual format?
