Voyant Visualizations of VWWP Texts
Data Visualization and Management Workshop
My name is Brianna Marshall and I am the Scientific Data Curation Assistant for the IU Libraries. I will be teaching an October 2013 workshop with my colleagues Stacy Konkiel (Science Data Management Librarian, IU Libraries) and David Polley (Research and Editorial Assistant, Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center). We jumped at the chance to use these texts to demonstrate the topical analysis component of our workshop. Our main objective for the topical analysis workflow is to give attendees a brief introduction to the text analysis tool Voyant. We'll be uploading a zip file of 15 TEI-encoded texts from the Victorian Women Writers Project (VWWP). These were selected arbitrarily to explore the research question, "Was love a leading theme within the VWWP texts?"
We'll be making our workshop materials available after the workshop and I will link to those here at that time. In the meantime, here are a few screenshots of the VWWP texts we analyzed using Voyant.
A screenshot of the Voyant interface. Stop words have been applied to the corpus.. A screenshot of the Voyant interface after the corpus has been uploaded. Stop words have been applied to the corpus. The Word Trends pane is automatically displaying the five most frequently appearing words across the corpus.
This screenshot shows the term "love" being selected with the Corpus Reader, causing the Word Trends to visualize the term frequency only with one of the texts rather than across all the texts. The Keywords in Context pane allows for closer inspection of these terms. This screenshot shows the term "love" selected with the Corpus Reader, causing the Word Trends to visualize the term frequency only with one of the texts rather than across all the texts. The Keywords in Context pane allows for closer inspection of these terms as they occur.
It's worth noting that our use for the purposes of this workshop doesn't do the corpus justice. While TEI is recognized by Voyant, the tool only removes administrative information such as who encoded it and other details that are not semantically relevant for analysis and visualization. Unfortunately, the tool cannot select individual TEI elements and explore them in detail.