Tag: Voyant

I choose the articles Alton encyclopedia 1880 and STL encyclopedia 1879 buy reading the Alton article I can assume that it is going over the history of the areas and important information on the region and its overall land mass. I think that STL has more Roads and history due to it being a popular area due to it being a larger area.

After reviewing the article on Voyant tools I was wrong, the article on Alton spoke more on the history and the land mass than the still one. Words such as River and Miles were mention on the page 3 different times. where the article on STL mainly focused on western history and what they used to produce in the area and the effect that slaves had on the area.

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=d44caaba9b69644db8da9a0c35fc1a67

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=ecf1210583f0b2b352795d9b2e02d68c

The two text that I chose were about the history of St. Louis around the 1860s discussing about the growth of the 19th century, slavery, and particular events leading up to the Civil War. The second article was about the current structure of the economy of St. Louis today. In regard to the population, governments, and culture.

When I input these articles into Voyant the most frequent words were St. Louis as expected. Though what I did not expect was for the word “St.” to be used 23 more times than the word “Louis.” The history of St. Louis article went into great details of all the major and significant conflicts leading up to the Civil War and little bit after as well. The modern era article went more into details about the preserved architecture and structure of the economy.

Texts I Used

For this assignment, I compared two Wikipedia articles: one about St. Louis, Missouri, and one about Edwardsville, Illinois. These two places are close to each other, but they are pretty different in size and lifestyle. St. Louis is a big city, while Edwardsville is smaller and more of a college town.

My Question

I wanted to see how the way people write about a big city is different from how they write about a smaller town nearby.

My Hypothesis

Before using Voyant, I thought the two texts would focus on different things. I expected:

• St. Louis would talk more about population, economy, history, and big city features
• Edwardsville would focus more on community, students, and education

I also thought the St. Louis article would be more complex, while Edwardsville would be simpler and more focused.

What I Did

I put both texts into Voyant Tools and looked at things like the word cloud and word trends. This helped me see which words showed up the most and what each text focused on.

What I Found

First, the most common words were different in each text.

• In the St. Louis article, there were a lot of words about the city itself, like population, river, and economy
• In the Edwardsville article, words like “university,” “students,” and “community” showed up a lot

One big thing I noticed is how important Southern Illinois University Edwardsville is in the Edwardsville article. It comes up a lot and seems to be a big part of how the town is described.

Also, the St. Louis article covered way more topics, like transportation, history, and business. Edwardsville stayed more focused on local life and education.

Conclusion

My hypothesis was mostly right. The two places are described very differently, even though they are close to each other. St. Louis is shown as a big, complex city, while Edwardsville is more about community and college life.

Using Voyant made it easier to see these differences because it shows patterns in the words, not just the meaning of the text.

Final Thoughts

This activity helped me understand how different communities are described based on their size and role. It also showed me how useful tools like Voyant can be for quickly spotting patterns in writing.

Ioannis Koupepides