Voyant Tools (http://voyant-tools.org) is a web-based platform for analyzing texts using a range of different visualization methods. Some are more informative than others; some require more interrogation than others. This platform is free to use, without any subscription or logging in necessary. This Guide will introduce you to loading up files in Voyant and how to engage with the data it provides.

Voyant’s landing page asks you to provide texts to analyze by ‘ADDING TEXTS’ and clicking ‘REVEAL’. You can copy and paste text into the window or enter some URLs of your choice. If you click on the open button, you’ll see that Voyant offers a couple of corpora for demonstration purposes. And, you can upload texts from your own computer if you have specific files saved you want to use. For today’s activity, we’ll be copying and pasting some URLs into this landing page. Voyant Tools will accept files in a lot of different, common formats (including .docx, .txt, .xlsx, .csv, and machine-readable .pdfs).

If you want to add multiple URLs, you can do that by entering one URL per line in the 'add text' box, as shown in the image below (which uses several chocolate chip cookie recipes as an example):

If you want to upload a file from your computer, use the UPLOAD button and navigate to a file to upload. You can upload multiple files from this screen for comparison, too. When that is done, click ‘REVEAL’ and go to the next page of this guide.