Question:

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?

Answer:

I would be happy to help someone else learn how to use Voyant! Especially because I have used it on a final project for a class that was very meaningful for my academic journey (Digital Methods in Literary Studies, taught by Professor Erik Simpson). It’s the stylometry project on Fernando Pessoa’s writings. While both tools offer valuable insight into the nuance of texts, Gale Digital Scholar Lab has a more user-friendly interface. The “Clean” tool is particularly easy to find and understand as compared to Voyant. I would probably prefer working with Voyant because I am used to it, but Gale Digital Scholar Lab might be better for projects that require a lot of preprocessing.