Je peux voir ses utilisations (I can see its uses)

The word voyant felt uncannily familiar, although I couldn’t place it precisely. A little digging, and it turns out voyant, in French, is the present participle of voir (to see). It’s been two years since my last French class, and I’ve already forgotten most of it. So, Voyant is supposed to help you see hidden aspects of the text you’re researching. The name is appropriate to be sure.

As discussed in class, Voyant is a very analytical and statistical tool. As with statistical surveys, it takes some experience to properly interpret the data for it to be useful. Having just been introduced to it, we cannot use Voyant to its fullest capacity. With more practical knowledge, we will be able to make more accurate assumptions to the text without having read it.

Using the word-cloud alone does not tell us much about the plot or allegory of the text. We can only make suppositions on the most frequently used words. For Herland, we can tell Terry, women, country, and children are focused on. Said is heavily used, so we can assume there is quite a bit of conversation. By whom, to whom, is the question unanswered.

Love must play a fairly large role in the text, but in the first four chapters, I do not recall it mentioned much. Left-clicking the word ‘love’ in the word-cloud sets it as a focus for all the applets shown in the Corpus View. Looking at the Trends applet, love is not mentioned until the third segment. More so in the fourth, then wains in usage until the later segments.  Finally, becoming a frequent topic in the text.

At its default settings,  Voyant fails to give us a clue as to a very important topic in the first four chapters of the book: escape. I’ve yet to determine if its a failure of the tool, as its looking at an entire text, or if I am failing to use Voyant properly. As an important topic, I would expect ‘escape’ to show up somewhere. I inserted Herland into Notepad++ (the coder’s best friend) and ran a basic search for the word ‘escape’. It and its forms are only used thirteen times throughout the text. I loaded just the first four chapters of Herland in Voyant. Escape occurs nine out of the thirteen times in the first four chapters. Still, even statistically more frequent, it does not show up in the word-cloud.

I do like Voyant’s functionality. The connection between applets is nice, and the different ways of visualizing text help give a larger picture to the texts being analyzed. It’s a tool I’ll be using in conjunction with others when I’m looking to fully analyze a text.

I’m especially looking forward to Annotation Studio. Being able to add notes to text is a necessity to close reading. I’ve been doing this with most of the books I’ve read for classes. I use an Android tablet and use e-reader apps to take notes as I’m reading. Being able to save them to the cloud, sync between devices, and have them always available has been very useful. With the class being able to share notes together, we’ll be able to see how others view the text in new ways . I’m looking forward to seeing how others close read texts and discussing how different tools can help examine literary works.