The Digital Hub

In our previous newsletter we briefly talked about the benefits of Voyant and its application for textual analysis. Today we'll be talking about a similar program, Wordsmith. Despite Wordsmith's age (originally launching in 1996!) the program still sees use today. Similar to Voyant it allows users to analyze their chosen text using a few different methods of deeper textual analysis. In Wordsmith the three main focuses are: Keywords, WordLists, and Concordances. One of the main benefits that WordSmith has over Voyant is an increase of user freedom over the information looked at and presented. With WordSmith you can create custom Stop Lists of words that you want the program to simply ignore and not include in the final analysis. This allows digital scholars the ability to focus on the specific work that they are interested in, rather than having to pick and choose pieces out of the larger Voyant presentation of the entire work. This can help in quick surface level analysis of a large body of work, whether that be the collected works of an entire author, or a collection of newspaper articles over the decades. If you're interested in trying out the program Wordsmith 8.0 is available for use on multiple computers in the Digital Hub!

While the Digital Hub has WordSmith 8.0 available on our computers you can also download WordSmith 4.0 for free directly from the WordSmith website:

https://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/downloads/