So we have all played with Voyant. However, a couple of weeks ago they updated the system and released Voyeur 3.0. With this version there are also voyant tools, which are graphs that depict the various forms of data that Voyant analyses. Most of the graphs are different ways to see word frequencies.
1st problem:
The Tools, as cool as they are run on Java, and for some sort of compatibility issues, do not run on the Google Chrome server. This of course was easily fixed and Voyeur Tools ran on Safari.
2nd Problem:
the Tools are in beta. So many of them still have bugs that are being worked out. And there are few instructions on what each graph should do, and how to make them work properly. I’ll continue working with some of them, because the graphics are cool. Hopefully they actually work.
3rd Problem:
Some things that happened almost instinctively in the older version was difficult for me to work the same way with this version. the graphing of specific word frequencies, for example, in the older version, you would just type the word in the search bar, hit enter and they would all show up on the graph, it took me days to realize that they needed a comma between the words. I tried semi-colons, colons, hyphens, and a few other punctuations. for what ever reason comma never came to mind.
4th problem:
The directions are very basic and very difficult to navigate through. I searched through them a few times for different questions and found website itself dizzying. It takes you around in circles and the explanation unhelpful and missing steps.
However, this is now this option to import .txt files which I think is much more convenient then the copy and paste of the older version.
I needed to vent about the changing software.
Changing software is a headache no matter how comfortable you are with working with software. At the Omeka workshop at the GC a couple weeks back, the resident Omeka expert was very upset at how little the new Omeka version could handle extensions used in the previous version. I’m dealing with a lot of errors that I suspect are related to the fact that last month R updated to version 3.0. Reminds me of back in the day (AKA the 90s) when I had a high school teacher who was so jealous of my DVD player, because his wife wouldn’t let him buy one. He had hundreds of movies on VHS, and she wasn’t about to let him throw down money just to watch him rebuy all those movies. Except now the issue is upgrading these virtual tools is free, but they upgrade so fast, and the poor developers that have nothing to do with the company building the core tool have real headaches trying to upgrade their stuff to work with the new version.