Q: 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?
Voyant is a very user-friendly tool for doing text analysis. Compared to Gale Digital Scholar Lab, it is more interactive and gives you more information upfront. I think for someone just starting out with text analysis Voyant might be a useful tool for understanding and visualizing just how much you can do with text analysis software.
I did get the sense that Gale Scholar Lab gives you more control over how you actually do the text analysis, even though we didn’t really go through this a whole lot in the training. In this sense, Gale Scholar Lab might be a more useful tool for tailoring text analysis to what you want out of your digital humanities project.
I really liked the interactive features of the tools on Voyant. I can see that it would be really helpful if for example, you could visualize the relationship between two words and then easily look up how often and where they occur in the text. This kind of analysis could be very helpful to gain some preliminary understanding of the text you’re working with. I think I’d prefer working with Voyant in the beginning to get a general idea about the text, and then use Gale Digital Scholar Lab to fine-tune the analysis.
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