Voyant Tools is a free website/tool suite for analysing digital texts. You can feed it some text or webpage(s), and explore the text from various quantitative perspectives. Try it out with a page from Wikipedia if you like.
Click here to explore a sample project I created, using the translated text of Che Guevara's infamous 1964 speech at the United Nations, New York.
And feel free to edit and update this wiki page, sharing your experiences if you choose to give Voyant a try. As a linguist, I like how easy it is to get started, but I think many of its widgets are of little value, research wise. Critical reflection on what these kinds of tools can and cannot teach us is sometimes lacking in the field of corpus linguistics.
- What do you think are the benefits of a tool like this?
- What are its drawbacks?
- What methodological decisions are being made for you, by the tool?
- How might Voyant be used in a Digital History research project?