The DH@Guelph Summer Workshops returned in-person from May 9-12th, 2023. This year, I was invited to lead a workshop on Introduction to Voyant Tools.
Voyant Tools is a web-based text reading and analysis environment that allows you to work with your own text or collection of texts.
During the workshop, I led participants through an overview of the Voyant Tools platform, current debates in the digital humanities regarding distant and close reading, and an overview of text analysis.
Then, I demonstrated several common tools in Voyant, including Cirrus, Trends, and Keywords in Contexts. I used Twitter data I had collected in the weeks after Rupi Kaur was announced Writer of the Decade by Rumaan Alam in New Republic to demonstrate how Voyant Tools can help scholars combine distant and close reading methods in literary scholarship.
Specifically, using Cirrus (or the word cloud tool), I identified a series of tweets referencing the poet Nayyirah Waheed. I then used the Contexts tool to see the context in which this poet was referenced in online conversations about Rupi Kaur. I discovered that Twitter users were discussing allegations that Kaur had plagiarized from Waheed, and were promoting Waheed work (and the work of other Instapoets) as an alternative to Kaur.
The workshop was fun to lead and participants commented that they left feeling comfortable using the tool and with a good sense of how text analysis tools could be used in their research.
Kiera Obbard 