Getting Started with Voyant Tools

Voyant Tools is an open-source web application dedicated to text analysis and visualization. It is particularly useful for a first exploration of corpora in the social sciences because it works directly in the browser and does not require a complex installation.

What Voyant Tools Allows You to Do

• quickly visualize word frequencies;
• observe how terms are distributed across a corpus;
• contextualize the appearance of a word through concordances;
• explore a corpus with simple and immediate visualizations.

Voyant Tools is a good complement to Orange Data Mining for people who want to begin with a lightweight, visual, and accessible approach.

Use Voyant Tools Online

The tool is directly available at voyant-tools.org. It is the simplest entry point for discovering how it works, importing a corpus, and starting an exploration.

Use Voyant Server Locally

Voyant Tools also offers a local version, Voyant Server, which is useful when you want to work offline or keep sensitive data on your own machine.

Prerequisites

Voyant Server requires Java 11. You can install it from:

• Adoptium
• Oracle

Installation

Then download the latest version of Voyant Server from GitHub, extract the archive, and launch the VoyantServer.jar file.

If You Run into Problems

If the application does not launch automatically, you can open it from the terminal:

java -jar VoyantServer.jar

This is especially useful on macOS when graphical launch is blocked by security settings.