Voyant Tools: Bringing Humanities into the Digital Age

    

    Different educational disciplines have embraced digital tools and the internet to varying degrees, math and science at least in my school experience were much more open to digital tools, whereas history and other humanities seem to be stuck in the old way, especially at the college level where professors have been in the discipline for decades, long before the advent of the internet. However despite this stubbornness, many historians, anthropologists and philosophers have begun to see the massive advantages digital tools can give them both in the classroom and while researching. Tools such as voyant!

Voyant is a web based text analysis tool that is incredibly intuitive and easy to access. By just going to https://voyant-tools.org/  and entering a web site a pdf link, voyant tools will quickly analysis the text present on the page and provide multiple different reports or the corpus as they call it. These reports come in the form of a word cloud, an easy visual that quickly shows the most repeated words, a graph showing word frequency by segment of text, vocabulary density, and a plain text based reader for the text. All of these combined allow for the user to much more thoroughly analyze an article or long form text. This analysis can then be presented to a class or used as part of a lesson to show students the value of breaking down texts to their component parts to more thoroughly grasp the reading. All free of charge and accessible over the web. Voyant tools will certainly help breath new digital life into the dustier humanities subjects.