Voyant

Image credit: screen capture of Voyant Tools instance with the Italian text of the Orlando furioso organized by canto.

Voyant (https://voyant-tools.org) is a web-based tool that generates top terms and phrases from a given set of text, incorporating data and trends over time. In the context of this project, Voyant provided a sense of relevant themes and repeated motifs from either the whole poem or a particular section (i.e. the moon scenes). The tool provides "stop words," allowing the user to determine what is worth searching for versus which types of words and phrases are "filler" or unimportant for a certain passage. Voyant was also used to highlight and grab specific passages and words from the poem, such as the 15 words before and after every instance of a form of the word "vostre" to give added context to these terms and their roles within the poem. 

Voyant also highlights another important aspect of this project, being the 16th century Tuscan the poem was written in and the bilingual approach we took. The built in stop words of the poem are less comprehensive for Italian texts, likely due to the variations of gender and number of the language, as opposed to English, a problem exacerbated by the antiquated form of the language of the poem. As such, the tool required more manual decision-making and oversight when sorting through the Furioso. Voyant itself also highlights the effects that translation has on the poem, and the aspects of he original that simply cannot be translated accurately or completely into modern English. Unsurprisingly, the top terms returned for a section of the poem differed based on the language of the imported text and which translation was used. While this problem is clear when dealing with any foreign language text mediated through translation, Voyant as a tool made these distinctions even clearer by providing direct comparisons and data on specific terms and words used.