Visualization
There are many good text visualization tools freely available nowadays. Some are specific for poetry, while some work for any kind of text. In this section, you will find information, examples, and links to two visualization software that can be used at many different levels of expertise and sophistication.
Voyant Tools
Voyant Tools have become widely known amongst the general public for their Word Clouds of texts like the one on the left. The software is easy to use and very much self-explanatory. The user has only to input a plain text version of a text and click “reveal” and the software will automatically generate the Word Cloud. You can try it yourself with the plain text version of The Wreck of the Deutschland at the end of this page.
Word Clouds, however, are deceptively simple, as they can reveal a lot of unexpected information about a text or a corpus of texts. Their simplicity of use and potential for textual analysis makes them extremely useful tools for experimentation and scholarship.
Furthermore, Voyant Tools offer much more than just Word Clouds. Depending on the interest and the level of investment of the user, Voyant Tools can be used to perform very sophisticated textual analysis. The images on the left, for example, are Link and Textual Arc visualization of The Wreck of the Deutschland.
Poem Viewer
Poem Viewer is a visualization software specifically designed by the University of Oxford to aid in the analysis and close reading of poems.
This software, also freely available, creates intricate visualizations of poems, like the ones on the left, which can be useful in revealing information about a poem that may, otherwise, go unnoticed by the reader.
While more complicate to use than tools like Voyant, Poem Viewer offers the user a lot of options for data analysis and a wide range of freedom to select different parameters of study. Using this software requires more investment and a willingness to learn on the part of the user, than others, however, the results can be invaluable for both beginner and proficient students of prosody.
