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PolyU Library

Online Tools for Assignment

Introduce useful online tools that may help to prepare your assignment.

Voyant


Voyant Tools is an open-source online tool that supports scholarly reading and interpretation of a body of text and corpus. You can input the URLs, copy and paste your text, or upload your text file to perform different text analysis.

We will analyze the text from a Wikipedia article - Prisoner's dilemma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma) in the following example to show you how Voyant Tools can help us. For more information, please consult the official help page.

Cirrus is a word cloud that visualizes the top frequency of words used in a corpus or texts in a document. The words with the highest frequency will have a larger size and positioned centrally.

You can adjust the number of words to be shown in the word cloud from the Terms slider at the bottom.

If you mouse over the top-right corner, you can find an Options button () which allows you to make the following adjustment:

  • Stopwords: allows you to exclude a a set of words.
  • White List: allows you to include a set of allowed words, i.e. only words in this list will be shown.
  • Max Terms: allows you to specify the maximum number of words to be fetched.
  • Font Family: allows you to change the font style.
  • Palette: allows you to edit the font colors.

To export the word cloud, click on the Export button (). You can export it via a URL or an image in PNG or SVG format.

Collocates show us a table of keywords frequently appearing together with the terms in the corpus or the texts in a document. You can use this function when you mouse over the top-right corner and click on the Window icon (), then select Corpus Tools > Collocates:

By default, the table shows the following columns by default:

  • Term: The keywords being searched.
  • Collocate: The keywords frequently appears with the Term.
  • Count: The frequency of the collocate appears in proximity to the Term.

You can add keywords into the search box at the bottom. The slider allows you to determine how much context to consider when looking for collocates. The Options button (allows you to define a set of stopwords to exclude. To export the information, click on the Export button (). You can export it via a URL or an image in PNG or SVG format.

For a graphical view of collocates, you may try the Links tool as shown below:

Trends is a visualization showing how frequent a term occurs/appears across a corpus or texts in a document. The document is divided into 10 equal parts while different keywords are indicated in different colors. 


You can add keywords into the search box at the bottom. The Display button allows you to show or hide the labels and change the chart type. The Options button (allows you to define a set of stopwords to be excluded. To export the information, click on the Export button (). You can export the information via a URL or an image in PNG or SVG format.

Knots is a creative visualization where the terms in a document are represented as a series of twisted lines. Each occurrence of the term is represented by a bend in the line, hence the more the twisted lines, the more the repetition of a term. 

You can add keywords into the search box at the bottom. The functions of the 3 sliders next to the search box are listed below:

  • speed: allows you to set how fast the knots are composed.
  • start angle: allows you to set the angle each line will originate from.
  • turn angle: allows you to set the angle of turning for each occurrence.

The Options button () allows you to define a set of stopwords to be excluded. To export the information, click on the Export button (). You can export the information via a URL or an image in PNG or SVG format.

There are still a lot of tools available in Voyant Tools to use, like corpus, document, visualization, grid, etc. You may explore them from the official help page () as shown below:


Creative Commons License

Except where otherwise noted, the content of this guide is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.