Potential Powerful Search Tool for Puritan Literature - Voyant Tools

[davejonescue]

Hello all. I came across this tool somehow tonight browsing the internet. Personally, this interface could blow Puritan Search out of the water. They have 2 options; 1 being the online interface here, and they have another option to download the "server" which is basically the local app for your laptop or desktop. That can be found here. This thing looks extremely powerful that it is going to take me days to get the gist of it. But, I will say that utilizing Project Puritas' HTML Puritan Corpus, you can do extremely indepth searches with it. It does stuff like gives you word frequency when you hover over a word in the reader view, gives you a summery of each text; I am just going to stop because the below video explains it way better than I ever could. I think this thing was released recently, and was kind of built custom to take advantage of EEBO-TCP texts. I am going to try to find more about this, and possibly see if I can add this as an option on the Puritan Search website; but this is borderlining on the nerdy type stuff that will only interest certain folks. Hope this helps, and look forward to anybody responding who may have info on this site/software. It is open-source and free to use.

 

[davejonescue]

After investigating this software some more there are pros and cons. The pros is the awesome functionality of its text analysis. This would work awesome for say the Bible broken up into 66 books so each book could be analyzed separately, or as a whole. Or for singular Puritan documents, or singular authors. The cons, the problem with Voyant is it does not do very well with "large" corpus'. So analyzing the scope of Puritan literature within it is almost impossible. This makes Puritan Search, though not as endowed with as many textual analysis features, a much better option at digesting the Puritan corpus for most people; as most people will be more interested in topical studies rather than, for instance, how many times "man" was used in a text. Meaning, more people will be interested on what the entirety of Puritan & Non-Conformist thought is regarding "faith" as opposed to how many words are in a given document, what the average sentence length is, etc. Being brutally honest, if I had to pick between the two, I would hands down choose Puritan Search. Not just because I had a hand in its creation, but because it is much better at facilitating searches, its organization is much clearer, it can process the entire 6,500 work corpus, and it takes you right where you need to be in the corpus for a search inquiry. With that being said, Voyant is very powerful, and for those without Logos, it will most likely be an awesome tool for English based Bible studies.

 

[davejonescue]

This is a cool little meme I made (though hope its appropriate to incorporate "work" and "church" in the same context.) It was made with Voyant Tools. Basically, here, it has taken the top 5 words in Richard Baxters "The Reformed Pastor," and shown where each instance is located in the text. In Voyant, each word is color coated; but here you can see the prevalence of just these 5 topics throughout the text. I have posted it online, now to see if people catch on.