Voyant

Helpful tutorial here– Digital Humanities Tool Workshop

Voyant was pretty self-explanatory. If you’ve ever made a word cloud before, this is just a slightly more complicated version of that.

For my data, I used the text from newspaper clippings I have been gathering about one woman’s life, a large part of which occurred in the Stingaree. The total amount of words is about 3,500, so it would be nice to be able to see larger themes/who she interacted with the most based on the data I have available.

Now, click “Reveal”

If you toggle from the “Reader” to the “TermsBerry” view, you can see how often the words are used in the text, and their relationship to other words throughout. Play around with the sliding scales at the bottom of each widget, too, to increase the amount of data displayed in the graphics.

Next time, I would probably try to upload each article as a separate document and see if that makes it easier for the software to read. Even though it looked fine when entered on the plain text screen, it came out with less preservation of structure than I would like, especially considering that the software is looking for connections between words and phrases.