My experience
For this assignment, I used Voyant Tools to analyze The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. I first explored the “Cirrus” tool in the top left corner, which generates a word cloud showing the most frequently used words in the text. Unsurprisingly, “Tom” appeared as the most common word, followed by words such as “said,” “Huck,” and “don’t.” Similar to what we discussed in class, the word cloud helped us identify recurring and perhaps important terms, but I realized that the frequency of a word does not necessarily tell us much about its significance in the story. The word “jpg” appeared among the frequently used words in the Cirrus tool. At first, I was confused. I realized that the digital version of the book included references to images at the end, which explained the appearance of “jpg.” This discovery made me realize that this tool does not distinguish between the actual literary content and additional materials included in a digital file. I became more interested when I switched from “Cirrus” to “Links,” which visualizes how frequently used words are connected to one another. One relationship that caught my attention was the connection between “Tom” and “said.” This seemed like something obvious, because Tom is the main character who is present for most part of the story. You may argue that dialogue plays an important role in developing Tom’s character.
Reflection
This experience made me think about the limitations of computational approaches in the Age of AI. Although tools like Voyant can quickly process thousands of words and identify relationships, they cannot necessarily explain the historical or cultural significance of those relationships. I think the greatest concern is that we may begin to confuse the ability to identify patterns with the ability to understand them. Nonetheless, I am still amazed by how Voyant Tools could help us visualize data that was hard to gather or may take too much effort. It is definitely essential to learn the way to use such tools.