Reading Commentary: Text as Data
For this assignment we had to use two textual analysis tools on a piece of text of our choice. I chose the text: Talk of Uncle George to his Nephew about Draw Poker
The two textual analysis tools are as follows: -Voyant: which deals with digital texts -AntConc: deals with concordancing and text analysis
**Voyant: **
Voyant really tells you a lot about the keywords themselves which are in the text. For example you can see from the picture above that the words “Gutenberg”, “Game”, “Poker”, and “Money” are some of the most frequent words in the text. In this case that would make sense since the text is about the discussion of a poker game.
**AntConc: **
AntConc shows you things like word frequencies and concordances of words within the text.
In the picture above you can see things like ranking of the words according to their frequency in the text. Alot of the words are not significant keywords but still sometimes important keywords will show up like “gutenberg” which is ranked 13th place.
The picture above shows concordances for the word “best”. As seen in the passages that are attached to the word, best usually refers to the quality of something in the poker game like for example having the best poker hand.
I personally like Voyant better. Maybe it’s because I don’t really know how to use AntConc and found it more difficult to play around with. I feel like Voyant just overall is visually more appealing. It has nice colors and is well laid out which made everything that much easier for me to read. Also I feel like the data in Voyant can easily be viewed on the one page whereas for AntConc I have to keep scrolling down to see the other results. Another analysis I would find really useful is the idea of portraying main ideas or main themes.