downs-voyant-antconc-review

I chose to explore Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in Voyant and AntConc. Although AntConc is desktop based and Voyant is an online suite of tools, both calculate more or less the same metrics: word lists and counts, keywords, n-grams, concordance.

I am not a humanistic researcher; it was hard to understand exactly which questions I might be asking that these tools would be answering. I found the clustering tool to be interesting in that it revealed to me which characters were mentioned nearby each other. But you would also be able to tell this from reading the book, and it would give you a much better idea of how the characters interact with each other.

The Voant suite seemed less useful to me because I could not export data to analyze with my own tools, like I could with AntConc. I’d say they’re more or less equivalently useless.

What I’d like to see is an interface focused more on common questions that researchers have, or at least better guidelines on how to use these tools to answer those questions. In that respect, the documentation PDF that comes with AntConc is much better than the online documentation tat is available for Voyant. Also, the interface of AntConc, while less flashy, is easier to understand.