This activity was centered around using Voyant to find trends among words used in the group of documents we were given, and analyze what Voyant produced. Topic 15 gave the words: “toussaint”, “general”, “french”, “men”, “france”, “ouverture”, “hayti”, “domingo”, “island”, “blacks”, “cape”, “country”, “saint”, “government”, “war”, “made”, “leclerc”, “put”, “chief”, and “order”. Right away, before even putting the data into Voyant, we can see that these words might be related to the Haitian Revolution and Toussaint Louverture, as they are direct words that are given by the topic. “Put” and “made” are words in the topic that spark my interest, and I hope we can find some insight to why they are there.
Upon inserting the data, we are greeted with this page, which includes some data at the bottom left, which is where I first started to analyze this work. This portion includes some basic facts, such as the density of vocabulary, the longest and shortest individual pieces, and some other things. This also tells us the most frequent words which are men/man, time, great, and years. All of those are pretty basic words that you would find frequently in most pieces of work, except for “great”. Knowing this, I wanted to see if there was a connection to any figure/person that would be talked about in that connotation, and this person would be more than likely Toussaint Louverture. So, using the trend tool, I plugged in Toussaint and great, and sure enough, it showed that there was an apparent trend (below).
This observation is pretty surprising to me considering the time that these documents were written, it probably wasn’t that common at the time for black men to be written of in high regard. Thanks to the Voyant tool, I was able to realize a different viewpoint on Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution that I wasn’t expecting to see, without actually reading the documents.