Discover Unique Words in Civil Rights Oral Histories | Using #LDLasData

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. What is Voyant?
3. Navigating to Voyant
4. Uploading interview text files
5. Overview of Voyant panels
6. Understanding the "summary" panel
7. Analyzing distinctive words
8. Analyzing document terms
9. Digging deeper into distinctive words
10. Conclusion

Introduction

In this tutorial, we will be exploring a tool called Voyant that allows us to compare multiple Texts. Specifically, we will be using this tool to compare different interviews from our Civil Rights Oral History collection. By comparing these interviews, we can gain insights into the unique perspectives of each interviewee, even though they all discuss their involvement in the Civil Rights Movement in Louisiana. Throughout this tutorial, we will provide step-by-step instructions on how to navigate Voyant and analyze the data it provides. Let's get started!

What is Voyant?

Voyant is a powerful and complex tool that goes beyond the basic word frequency analysis covered in previous tutorials. While it may be a bit advanced for middle schoolers, it is certainly accessible for high school students and undergraduates. Voyant allows us to upload text files and provides various panels of information for analysis. We will be focusing on the "summary" panel and the analysis of distinctive words. Let's see how to access Voyant and upload our interview text files.

Navigating to Voyant

To access Voyant, You will need to navigate to voyant-tools.org. Once you are on the Voyant Website, you will see a range of tools and options available. For our purposes, we will be using Voyant to compare our interview text files. Let's proceed to the next step and upload our files.

Uploading interview text files

Before uploading the interview text files, make sure you have either downloaded them or compiled them into a separate folder. In Voyant, click on the upload button and navigate to your Interview Text Files folder. Select the interview files you want to compare by holding down the shift key and clicking on the desired files. Once you have selected the files, click "open" to start uploading the corpus. Now that our files are uploaded, let's take a look at the panels of information provided by Voyant.

Overview of Voyant panels

When you first open Voyant, you will see multiple panels of information. While these panels may appear overwhelming at first, we will focus on a few key data types for our analysis. The panel we will start with is the "summary" panel, located in the lower left-HAND quadrant. You can resize the panels as needed to get a better view. Let's explore the "summary" panel and the insights it provides.

Understanding the "summary" panel

The "summary" panel in Voyant provides a quick glance at important information about the uploaded texts. Here, you can see the length of each interview, the vocabulary density, and the average sentence length. For our analysis, we will focus on the "distinctive words" section within the "summary" panel. These distinctive words are the words that occur frequently in one interview but not as frequently in the others, making them unique to each interviewee. Let's Delve deeper into analyzing these distinctive words.

Analyzing distinctive words

In the "distinctive words" section of the "summary" panel, you can see a list of words that are unique to each interviewee. By default, you will see five distinctive words, but you can adjust the slider at the bottom left to view more or fewer items. To gain a more comprehensive understanding, we recommend increasing the number of distinctive words to 40. As you explore these words, note that some may not hold much significance, while others can provide Meaningful insights into the interviewee's perspective. Consider creating a separate text document to keep track of the most meaningful distinctive words. Let's move on to analyzing document terms to further enhance our analysis.

Analyzing document terms

To gain a deeper understanding of the distinctive words, we can utilize the "document terms" tool within Voyant. By selecting "document terms" from the drop-down menu within the "document tools" panel, we can explore the significant terms within each interview. The "significance" column allows us to sort the terms in descending order of importance. By scrolling through the list, we can see more significant terms beyond the initial 40. This analysis provides further insights into the vocabulary and themes present within each interview. Now, let's explore the possibility of digging even deeper into the distinctive words list.

Digging deeper into distinctive words

If you want to explore the distinctive words list even further, you can easily modify the panels in Voyant. For instance, you can change the "contexts" panel to the "document terms" panel by clicking on the windows icon and selecting "document terms". Within the "document terms" panel, you can adjust the documents you are focusing on by selecting the specific interview from the "documents" panel on the left. This allows for more detailed and specific analysis of the significant terms within each interview. By continuing to explore the distinctive words and document terms, a clearer picture of each interviewee's perspective can emerge. Let's conclude our tutorial on using Voyant for text comparison.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we have explored the powerful capabilities of Voyant, a tool that enables us to compare and analyze multiple texts. By uploading our interview text files, we were able to gain insights into the unique perspectives of each interviewee within the Civil Rights Oral History collection. Through the analysis of distinctive words and document terms, we were able to uncover meaningful Patterns and themes within the interviews. Voyant provides a valuable resource for researchers, students, and anyone interested in examining texts from new and insightful angles. With its user-friendly interface and comprehensive data panels, Voyant proves to be an indispensable tool for text analysis.