Voyant Tools Guide

Approved for data classification levels

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Voyant is a text reading and analysis environment. It is possible to work with one or more texts in a variety of formats.

1. Using the Voyant application

1.1 Finding the application

• Click on the applications button

• Click on search

• Search ”Voyant”

• Click on Voyant

1.2 Using the application

You should now see the following screen:

There are several options here, and it can seem overwhelming. For this example, we’ll walk through the quickest way to start the app.

1.2.1 Choose a name for your job

• Pick a name that makes it easy to find your work later and distinguish between different jobs
• Write the name under “Job Name”.
• Example: "Voyant_demo1". Note: Job and file names cannot include special characters such as "æøå".

1.2.2 Select the duration of your job

• Select the duration of your job and enter the number under “Hours”
• You need to estimate for how long time you will need to use the app. The application can take some time to show results, because it analyzes all text before showing you, afterwards you can edit what types of reading or analysis you will receive.

Note: If you run out of allocated time, the application still shows the results, but you cannot use the functions or make any changes. You can allocate more time after starting the job if needed.

1.2.3 Pick a machine to use

• We recommend the u1-standard-1.

Feel free to test what works best for you.

Now, you are ready to begin your work. Click Submit to start the process.

• Click on “Open interface” and the application will open.

Note: There can be waiting time before the interface is ready for you. Just wait until it looks like this:

Now the application pops up in a new window and you can upload the files you would like to work on. The entire text collection you are working on is called corpus in the application.

There are three main ways of selecting a corpus in Voyant Tools:

1. Type or paste into the main text area.
2. Insert a URL link to a webpage, one per line.
3. Upload one or more files from your computer.
4. Click on “open” if you want to use the pre uploaded texts (Frankenstein or novels by Jane Austin)

The upload file selector should allow you to choose one or more files using Ctrl and Shift keys. If you have several documents to add at once, it may be easiest to first create a zip archive containing the files and then upload the one zip file.

It is possible to work on one or more files and have combination of files and webpages.

• Press “Reveal” when you have all the texts for the corpus.

It can take some time for the application to read the corpus. Once the corpus is read you will be presented with the default skin. There are many more types of

You can choose other options of analysis here. The options are visible when you place the curser in the top bar of the analysis next to the questionmark.

Here’s a link to the different type of analysis called “skins” Click Here

You can edit the list of “stopwords” so the tools will not include the stopwords. Click on “Define options for this tool”

Options pops up. Click on “Edit List” next to “Stopwords”

Now you can add the words you don’t want to see in your research, one term per line

Click "Save" and then "Confirm" in options