Here we are looking at a lightly cleaned, optical character recognized version of Volume 1 of Aimé Cesaire's Cahiers césairiens (available online here). We removed all boilerplate language (headers, page numbers) and any text not in French prior to analyzing this file.
Each section of the Voyant Tools platform above is numbered. This provides a guide to what each section represents and/or what is provided in that section:
The Voyant Tools interface provides lots of information to sort through, and some parts are easier to interpret than others.
The biggest challenge is moving from the most obvious words to the less obvious words. We do not need a computer to tell us these extremely high-frequency words are present with the Word Cloud (#1) ; we could have derived this from simply reading the materials. For example, words like césaire, politique - words we know are intrisinic to the text (which contains interviews with Aimé Césaire about politics and political thinking) are not implausibly very frequent. But more interesting are the less-immediately-obvious words in the word cloud, such as premèire, christophe, française. We might already know that Cesaire is writing about La Tragédie du roi Christophe, but thinking about how he is using this phrase can be accomplished with they Keyword in Context viewer (#5, look up 'christophe' in the box on the bottom-left) to observe patterns of usage in context.
Secondly, we might want to see where these particular phrases are used in the whole of the document. The Text Reader (#2) is where we might find that certain words or phrases are more clustered in the top of the document or towards the end. This is something that would be harder to notice as a linear reader.
This is an iterative process! You might start with one word that looks interesting and end up somewhere totally different. That's OK and to be expected.