Voyant Tools

Voyant Tools is a web-based text analysis, reading and visualization environment. Developed by a small team of digital humanities scholars led by Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell, Voyant Tools is designed for a very wide range of applications and users, from students to researchers and journalists to market analysts. It strives to balance user-friendliness with a range of analytic and interpretive functions.

Memorial

Alas, Stéfan Sinclair, the leader, principal designer and inspired programmer behind Voyant, passed in August 2020. See https://csdh-schn.org/stefan-sinclair-in-memoriam/

Features

Some of the important features of Voyant Tools include:

• importing documents in various formats (plain text, HTML, XML, PDF, RTF, MS Word, ODF, etc.)
• several tools for studying term frequencies and distributions within documents and within a collection of documents (a corpus)
• a full-text reader that support very large texts and includes interactive features
• interaction between the the tools that facilitates navigation and exploration at diffent scales (from "close reading" to "distant reading")
• a mechanism for bookmarking and sharing instances of Voyant Tools (specific texts and tools) through persistent URLs
• access to a hosted version of Voyant Tools or a downloadable standalone version
• Voyant Tools is free and open source (GPLv3)

Documentation

The GitHub-hosted repository is oriented toward development of Voyant Tools, including bug and issue tracking. Help with using the interface is available from the Voyant Tools Guide site.

Contributing

There are many ways of contributing to the development of Voyant Tools:

• use it and let us know (@VoyantTools), having people use it is our reward :)
• if appropriate, please consider citing it
• if you find a bug, identify an issue or have requests, submit a GitHub ticket (or tweet)
• if you're a developer, see instructions for setting up a development environment and consider submitting a patch or pull request

License

Voyant Tools is an open-source project and the code is available through GitHub. The code is under a GPL3 license and the content of the web application is under a Creative Commons By Attribution license.

Voyant Tools 2.0

The currently available version of Voyant Tools is 2.0. It is a complete rewrite that is focused on better performance and scalability, as well as improved functionality (such as more powerful search). Voyant 3.0 is expected by 2020.

Releases

For a somewhat more detailed overview of releases please see VoyantServer releases

Known Issues

• several skins and tools are not yet implemented
• Voyant slows down as the index grows

Road Map

• new architecture to better support distributed indices (multiple users)
• update code to latest version of Lucene
• integrate some language-specific functionality such as part-of-speech tagging
• add functionality for word groups
• resume development of Spyral (Voyant Notebooks)

Credits