In a blog post on your portfolio site, reflect on the experience of learning how to use Voyant and how it compares to Gale Digital Scholar Lab as a tool for text analysis. How would you feel about helping someone else learn how to use it? What do you notice is similar about Voyant and Gale Digital Scholar Lab as digital tools for textual analysis? What are the differences? Which did you prefer working with? Why?
After uploading the example files to Voyant, I definitely felt that this text analysis tool was much more hectic visually compared to Gale Digital Scholar Lab (GDSL). Voyant tries to fit five categories of analysis within a single computer frame. Voyant gets all methods of analysis down for you to choose from and clean after the fact. GDSL definitely spreads this out for you in a manageable way. The steps this tool takes you through are first uploading files, then cleaning. Finally, you pick and choose which methods of analysis you want done.
The titles of each category of analysis weren’t apparent to me until they were pointed out to me in the training. There are so many other features I’ve missed upon first glance, like the search bar. In addition to these five general categories, these panels can be switched out for over 20 specified methods of analysis. I personally feel very overwhelmed by Voyant, but I’m also interested in the developers’ intentions behind this. Is it to make the diversity of analysis apparent? The clear abundance of possibilities with Voyant, on the other hand, does make it feel like a treasure chest. I do feel worried that helping someone else learn this tool will be difficult because it is not clearly organized.
In addition, it should be noted that Voyant is open-source, whereas GDSL requires payment and seems targeted at academic institutions. Despite Voyant’s messiness, I feel like I do prefer working with this text analysis tool compared to GDSL. Voyant, with its brighter colors and the fact that it is open-source, feels more like I’m exploring than doing “scholarly” work. This is not to say scholarly work is boring, but the colors of GDSL (navy, gray, and white) and the word “scholar” within GDSL seem to feed into these perceptions.