Moving around in the order a bit still, I tried out Voyant Tools this week. It’s another textual analysis tool that creates visualizations and other data analysis forms based on the text you provide. Specifically, I enjoyed the word map tool which visualizes the words in a web type construction depending on how close they are in the text. This was a fun way to visualize data and helped me understand it better as a visual person.
This tool seems helpful for situations where you want to get some of the general themes out of your text. Although, many of the most occurring words are simpler words (ie the interviewee’s name, articles, etc) so that isn’t as insightful. If you get further into the list of most occurring words I think it gets more valuable in revealing main themes.
Though I liked the link function in Voyant, I hoped for the ability to expand it and add more words. As far as I could figure out, I could only delete already existing words rather than adding more to the web. It’s a cool tool as is, but I think it would be even more interesting with a higher volume of words to link in varying ways and degrees.
It’s also interesting to note that as I looked through the list of words, some were highlighted in green and others in red. I assumed this was to try to show sentiments or emotions surrounding those words. However, queer was highlighted in red and I would think that some of the times that word was mentioned were positive or at least neutral. A similar thing happens for the word funny, which seems like a usually positive word. I’d be curious to know how the algorithm determines which words to highlight and which color.