Welcome to Dialogica: Thinking-Through Voyant!

Welcome to Dialogica: Thinking-Through Voyant!

Dialogica: Thinking-Through Voyant (DTTV) is a textbook for learning computer-assisted text analysis with Voyant and Spyral. It complements our book Hermeneutica: Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities (MIT Press, 2016).

Dialogica was developed by Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair in early 2020 to help those pivoting to online learning. We continue to add to it in memory of Stéfan who passed away in August, 2020.

Do you need online teaching ideas and materials? Dialogica was supposed to be a text book, but instead we are adapting it for use in online learning and self-study. It is shared here under a CC BY 4.0 license so you can adapt as needed.

Do you have a tutorial for Voyant you would like to adapt to Dialogica? Would you like to contribute? Send links and thoughts to Geoffrey Rockwell (grockwel at ualberta dot ca).

Contents

  1. Introduction: What is Dialogica? What is our pedagogical philosophy and our model for using these?

    Play an introductory video welcoming you to Voyant

  2. E-Texts and Analysis: Introducing Voyant and text analysis.

    Download: Walkthrough 1: What is an electronic text and how can we study it?

  3. Studying a Text: How to prepare a text and explore it.

    Download: Walkthrough 2: Studying a Text

  4. Sharing Results: Exporting and Embedding: How to share interactive Voyant panels in an online paper.

    Download: Walkthrough 3: Sharing Results: Exporting and Embedding

  5. Managing Corpora with Spreadsheets or XML: How to use either spreadsheets or XML to manage a collection of documents.

    Download: Walkthrough 4: Managing Corpora with Spreadhseets and XML

  6. Exploring a Corpus with Text Mining Tools: How to use text mining tools to develop conjectures about a collection.

    Download: Walkthrough 5: Exploring A Text

  7. Following a Theme Through a Text: Using different tools to research a theme in a text or corpus. This Walkthrough follows Walkthrough 5: Exploring a Text where you learned how to identify possible themes.

    Download: Walkthrough 6: Following a Theme

  8. Salient Words: How to use the Visualizations, Corpus Terms and Document Terms tools to see what words stand out.

    Download: Walkthrough 7: Salient Words

  9. The Voyant Help Files is a collection of short help files that show things you can do with Voyant.

  10. Other courses and useful links

  11. Other chapters planned:

    The arc of a project, Visualization, Clustering and comparing texts, The next step: introduction to Spryal

Dialogica Home Next: Introduction

© Stéfan Sinclair & Geoffrey Rockwell

All materials on this site shared under a Creative Commons By Attribution license.