INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL
TOOLS: VOYANT &
ANTCONC
BY
FAC 211 TEAM
DHuFArts, Faculty of Arts, University of Uyo
Voyant Tools
Voyant Tools: History
• There are different digital tools used for different computer-based analysis in the
humanities such: Voyant, AntConc, Mallet, Wordle, Juxta, WordSeer 4, etc.
• Voyant is a digital tool developed by Stefan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell in 2003.
• It is an open-source downloadable (from VoyantServer) and web-based application
used for computational text analysis.
• It is used for distant reading (as against close reading) of digital texts in different
file types (pdf, txt, HTML, RTF, XML, MS Word, etc.)
VOYANT TOOLS
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA
Functions of Voyant Tools
• It supports scholarly reading of large
corpus (corpora) or digital texts.
• It is used for performing text analysis.
• It is designed to facilitate reading and
interpretative practices.
• It is designed to tabulate, analyse and This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND
visualise texts.
Getting Started with Voyant Tools
1. Start by opening Voyant in your web browser. There are two ways to open a corpus or text for analysis.
The first is to choose open. This will give you the option to work with one of the pre-loaded corpuses in
Voyant - the complete works of William Shakespeare, and the complete works of Jane Austen. These are
good resources if you’re curious to see what you can do in Voyant, or if you happen to be working on
research about either of these corpuses.
2. To upload your own text or corpus, choose upload. From here, choose files from your computer to
analyze. Voyant can recognize plain text, HTML, XML, PDF, RTF, and MS Word formats. Depending on how
many files you upload, it could take a few minutes for Voyant to create a corpus.
3. Once you’ve chosen a preloaded corpus or uploaded your own, you’ll see your Voyant “dashboard”. This
tutorial will go in depth into all of the default tools Voyant chooses for you, as well as how you can
customize this dashboard to show any visualization tools you want.
Tools of Voyant
• The Cirrus • Corpus Collocates
• The Reader • Collocate Graph
• Trends • Bubblelines
• Summary • Bubble
• Contexts • Catalogue
Cirrus
• A cirrus is a word cloud that visualizes the highest
frequency words in a corpus.
• It provides a convenient, though somewhat
reductive view of the content of your corpus.
• Hovering over words in the cirrus shows exact
word frequency, and clicking on the word will
cause other tools to react.
• The green arrow is pointing to the terms slider.
This allows you to adjust the number of words
displayed in the cirrus. The minimum number
of words you can include is 25, the maximum is
500 words, and the scale moves in increments
of 25.
The Reader
• A text reader is exactly what it sounds like -
a way to read documents in the corpus,
always loaded.
• The space underneath the text is called
the prospect viewer. This part shows an
overview of the entire corpus, which is
helpful when you’re working with a large
corpus that contains multiple documents
• The blue line represents where in the corpus
we’re reading, and you can click anywhere
along the corpus to jump around
Trends
• The trends tool is a line graph showing a
word’s distribution across a corpus or text
• Each series is colour coordinated with the
word it represents
• To look at trends for one document in a
corpus, hover over a point and double click -
here you can choose to see trends for either
the term you double clicked, or the
document
Summary Tool
• The summary tool is a textual overview of
the corpus
• Components of the summary tool depend on
the length and style of the corpus
• Options for the summary tool include:
Number of words per document, Vocabulary
density per document and Average words
per sentence in each document.
Context
• The contexts tool shows each occurrence of
a keyword with a bit of surrounding text.
• This tool is a good way to analyze how
certain terms are used in different contexts.
• Keywords can be changed with the menu.
• It’s the area of Key Words In Context
(KWIC).
Other Tools
• Some of these tools are
more useful for analyzing
an entire corpus, while
others are suited for
individual documents
Antconc Tools
Antconc Tools: History
• Antconc is a DH tool developed by Lawrence Anthony in 2002.
• It is a freeware corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis.
• It has user-friendly interface and comprehensive features.
• Corpus analysis is a form of text analysis, which allows you to compare the use of specific
linguistic features between texts (or collections of texts).
• It accepts files in plain text format. AntFileConverter can be used to convert different file
formats into plain text for use in AntConc.
• The Antconc tools are built for Windows, Macintosh OS X, and Linus)
Interface of Antconc
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA
Getting Started
• Download Antconc from the AntLab Website. Run it on your computer or
laptop and get it installed freely.
• If you need to convert files from Word or PDF to .txt, download
the AntConverter, and to make sure your files are in the correct
encoding, download EncodeAnt
• If you are preparing your own corpus, download Corpus Text Processor
from CROW
• If you need to convert and standardize your text, you can use the Corpus
Text Processor. You can read more about it here.
Using AntConc Tools
• Concordance
• Concordance Plot
• File View
• Cluster/N-grams
• Collocates
• Keyword List
• Word List
Concordance
• We will use the concordance tool to
view Key Words in Context (KWIC). In the
search box, we will type a word and click
start. The concordance window will then
show you every occurrences of that
word.
• If we search for the in our uploaded
corpus, this is what the output will look
like.
Concordance (2)
• Now, I can use the Kwic sort to sort the
words to the right or to the left of my
search word. In my example case, I am
sorting using the first word to the left,
then the second word to the right, and
the third word to the right. Remember to
click sort.
•
Cluster/Ngrams
• This tool allows you to find the words that occur
frequently together. The first thing you have to do
in this window is to check the N-grams box in the
control panel.
• In this window, you can change the N-gram size
from 2 to 10. You can also choose varied N-gram
sizes to be printed in the same output. If you want
to establish a minimum frequency and range you
can change this setting in the control panel by
inputting a number on Min. Freq. and Min. Range.
The results can be sorted by frequency, range,
probability and word.
Collocates
• This tool allows you to see the words that
frequently occur in the company of your
search word. In the example, the
word paper was used as the search word
and in, the collocate window, we see the
words that usually occur with paper 5
words to the left or 5 to the right.
• It can be used to language, literary and
journalistic studies.
Recap
• Who is the author of Antconc tools?
• Who created Voyant tools?
• Cirrus is a feature of……………. tools?
• A this tool that allows you to see the words that frequently occur in the
company of your search word is called…..?
• Voyant tools accepts the following type files except: PDF, HTML, XRX, TXT.
• …………..is a line graph showing a word’s distribution across a corpus or text:
Trends, Collocates, Reader, Ngrams.
