I used Voyant to learn basic text analysis utilizing the corpus of WPA slave narrative documents. I used the five default tools: cirrus, reader, trend, summary, and contexts. While at times I had problems getting certain elements to work (particularly having the “trends” tool display document level trends of words) the exercise was quite revealing on several levels.

First, it is clear how such a tool can be beneficial in exploring larger trends within a large corpus of information. To see the relationships between commonly used words would be almost impossible by reading through the many volumes and thousands of pages of documents. Once common words were edited out, I saw a pattern in topics revolving around people and relationships, both relationships between members of enslaved families and between enslaved peoples and whites. See my post on the Cirrus cloud.

Second, it is clear that consistency matters. Interviewers did not use consistent terms in transcribing their interviews. Many wrote in a dialect so “master” became “massa” or “marster.” Through the summary and trends tool one can see in which states such dialect transcriptions were used. With each interviewer using their own spellings, it makes it difficult to see the bigger trends within the corpus.

Even with the challenges, use of Voyant with these texts gives a pretty good idea of overall topics when you pay close attention to the various terms. It also provides a way to direct future research into the WPA sources and other sources that may exist. It will take me some time to get proficient with the Voyant tools, but my limited experience has shown me it would be worth it.