Short Tutorial

Voyant

Tips

Suggest that you use Chrome if you are on Windows. It is most responsive and resilient against screen lockups for this tool.
Your exploration will begin at https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=bd21a9fdbe8a7e67556ede72ab51d10d
Help files for customizing the tool are at: http://voyant-tools.org/docs/#!/guide/start
Choose roles of recorder and presenter

As a group explore and discuss:

Spend some time exploring the interface. What can you tell about the underlying data as you explore with the tool?
- Is the text clean? Indexed? Filtered? Anything else interesting you note about the data?
Explore the functions of the tool and consider them critically.
- What can you manage to do? What is this tool good for?
- What sorts of things did you want to do, but could not?
- What can you infer from the interface about the text? What is still opaque?
Do you feel you can make claims about the intellectual content of the text based on the tool and its visualizations? To what extent? (Feel free to reach a little)
- Do any words trend together? Inversely?
- Can you isolate phrases of interest?
- Do any of the the visualizations help illustrate what you notice/assert regarding the text? Are some misleading? Confusing?

After your exploration, be prepared to report your findings to the other team(s) and take their questions.

What sort of conclusions/suspicions can we draw from canned tools in general?
- In what ways are these useful?
- What do we wish these could do?
- What do they obscure?