Word Soup! – Voyant’s Text Analysis Tool

I wanted to test out Voyant’s proficiency when it comes to using a text with multiple languages. To do this, I inserted various texts into the software: English, Spanish, and two texts with a mixture of both. Was Voyant able to 1. distinguish between the two languages and 2. make connections between words and phrases in both English and Spanish?

I first used Red Hot Salsa, a bilingual poem edited by Lori Marie Carlson. The text is composed of English and Spanish words adding authenticity to the United States’ Latin American experience. Voyant could not recognize, distinguish, nor take note of the differences in word structure or phrases. The tool objectively calculated the amount words used, the frequency by which they were used, and wherein the text, these words appeared. Another test consisted of a popular bilingual reggaeton song entitled Taki Taki performed by DJ Snake, Ozuna, Cardi B, and Selena Gomez. The system was able to again capture the amount of words and their frequent appearance. Yet, the way it measured the connection was through word proximity and in a song which repeats the same words and phrases, this measurement is not clear.

Finally, I decided on an old English text, one of my favorite poems: Sweetest Love, I do not Go by John Donne. Here I looked at the links tool and noticed the connection between the words die, sun, alive, and parted. The tool gave me a visual representation of metaphors inside the poem ( just because we are apart, we won’t die, like the sun, I will come again, alive ). I found the links section the most useful part of Voyant.

While exploring this tool, I recalled Cameron Blevin’s experience with text mining and topic modeling (Digital History’s Perpetual Future Tense). Like most of these digital apparatuses, one must go in with a clear intention prior to the text’s analysis and background. Without this, the quantitative measures will be there, but they will not have much meaning. They will become just Word Soup!