Voyant Tools Lab Post

The process of visualizing was very interesting because the unique images and ways to look at and analyze a text really enlightened me to different ways that I can view a text. Looking up words in the text and viewing specific trends on them really enhances this concept of "reading a text." Playing with and maneuvering the different tools allowed me to be placed in a different context of "The Crisis" with each new tool that I observed. For example, the visualization tool Mandela was particularly fun to engage in. It was similar to a web of words all connected through different colors. When the cursor was placed over a particular area, the lines connected to specific words would connect to one particular "Crisis" section, but I would like to learn more about how this works specifically because this looks to be a useful tool. While trying to figure out how to make this tool concrete I found where Voyant gives a description of the tool and states, "Mandela is a conceptual visualization that shows the relationship between terms and documents. Each search term (or magnet) pulls documents toward it based on the term's relative frequency in the corpus." I'm interested to unpack this to see how I can implement this tool in the future.