3.4. Frequencies with Voyant

Another micro-tool in Voyant is a visualization called Knots. It’s an active visualization, so if you add or take away words, they appear and disappear in real-time. Knots is one way to visualize frequencies instead of seeing a word cloud or simply a list. The more knots in a line, the more often that word is used. I looked at the five most-used words across the corpus (study, library, rooms, research, resources) as well as three words that were in both the librarians' suggestions and student responses (scholarly, primary, and articles). My motivation in choosing these words was two-fold. First, I wanted to see the difference in the frequently-used words and these other three words. Second, I wanted to analyze that difference--see how stark the contrast was and make some inferences.

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Before I started the visualization, I knew that “scholarly,” “primary,” and “articles” would be outliers. “Articles” is used 11 times across the responses, but “scholarly” and “primary” are only used twice each. Articles turned out to be not as much of an outlier as I thought it would be--it twisted slightly. The other two, though, are practically straight. This contrast emphasized the difference between the librarians' suggestions and student responses. The importance of that contrast was something that I hadn’t yet considered but that I would consider soon.

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