Voyant

So this is what I made today! It is a word cloud from a year of NASA press releases from Kennedy Space Center in the 1960’s.  Voyant is pretty easy to use, but I wonder how much it can be used to tell the story you want to tell, because one can simply delete and delete words until it looks interesting.  I used Adobe Acrobat to make my pdf’s more readable, then created text files and uploaded them to Voyant.  I think this might be a good tool to use when dealing with a massive corpus of original sources, which NASA definitely has.  I am excited and curious about the possibilities this kind of tool represents in my research for space history.  There is so much information available in the public domain, and this could really help me narrow down my topics, as far as primary sources are concerned.

About Christina Roberts

First year (2014/2015) Master's student in the History Department at the University of Nevada, Reno. Graduate Assistant. Working in fields of 20th Century Soviet & American Space History, Digital History/Humanities, History of Astronomy. Interested in theories of history, geology and planetary astronomy.