Introducing
Voyant &
Google’s
Ngram Viewer
Spencer D. C. Keralis
Postdoctoral Fellow in
Academic Libraries,
Council on Library &
Information Resources
& UNT Libraries
Spencer D. C. Keralis
Postdoctoral Fellow in
Academic Libraries,
Council on Library & Information
Resources
& UNT Libraries
@hauntologist
spencerkeralis.com
Distant Reading
Franco Moretti
“Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left
Review (I, Jan-Feb 2000).
Graphs, Maps, Trees. (London, New York:
Verso, 2005)
Stanford Literary Lab.
http://litlab.stanford.edu/
Wordle
Spencer D. C. Keralis. “Feeling Animal: Pet-Making & Mastery in The
Slave’s Friend.” American Periodicals (Volume 22, Number 2, 2012).
Google’s n-Gram Viewer
a
contiguous sequence of n items from a
given sequence of
 Used to reveal trends in word use across a
broad corpus, defined by the user (and
Google books, of course), and over
specified durée
 http://books.google.com/ngrams
Voyant
 “a
web-based reading and analysis
environment for digital texts.”
 Analytic tools to examine a user-specified
corpus.
 http://voyant-tools.org/
 Text
analysis of research institution policies
governing the retention and sharing of
research data.
 Text analysis of funding agency guidance
to applicants
 datamanagement.unt.edu
http://voyeurtools.org/?corpus=1339433219
420.4969
Limitations
 Visualizations
of “text data” are
information products, not knowledge
products.
 Proximity proves nothing without context.
 Unable to read metaphor, puns, figures of
speech, etc.
 Close reading, and contextual
understanding still required for proper
analysis.