The Voyant tool is capable of breaking down long (or short) pieces of digital writing into several different parts. For example, I uploaded the URL to the digital humanities Wikipedia page into the Voyant box, and clicked “Reveal”. This brought me to a page that had broken down every word and phrase on the entire page. When you’re reading something, like a Wikipedia page in this case, you don’t usually notice the finer details. Most people, like myself, go to Wikipedia to find quick information about a topic that your’re researching or writing about. The Digital Humanities Wikipedia page would be a type of “distant reading”.
Using Voyant Tools, makes the analysis of an article more objective. With Voyant, you can see the details of the article right in front of you. If a class of students were writing a paper or response to an article, they would certainly all have their differences because people see things differently. Even though they have the same text in front of them, people take away different meanings because they’ve all had different life experiences. Voyant takes away those differences that people have when analyzing. It lays out all of the facts in front of the user so that they can look at the article objectively.
Finding the most important parts of a text is usually what people want to do. Voyant pulls out the most used words and also shows trends within the article. To the left you can see the most frequent words that occur on the Digital Humanities Wikipedia page. The top three are humanities, digital, and new, so no surprises there. Looking at this, the answer to ‘what is digital humanities?’ is answered in a different way than it would be through reading the article. Rather than having to sort through the entire page for the answers, Voyant shows the core information that the subject focuses on. Just by looking at the most frequent terms, you can see that digital humanities is about new technology, and a lot of research and analysis. As I said before, reading is subjective, but this tool only shows you the most important information of an article so that analyzing the text can become more of an objective experience.
Digital Tools & Technologies 