Group members: a_colombo, k_elliott3, a_rocha3, Kyle C, p_drake
Our given website to examine was a philosophical collection of sorts. The site’s author, Kieran Healy, had complied a smorgasbord of citations into one giant, graphical web, all references to philosophy journals and articles written by people who most likely knew what they were talking about better than we understood it. From what we gathered, the research question most likely being focused on was simply an effort to discover what kinds of things the philosophical community was chitchatting about, and who was doing the chitchatting. Hence, the website was geared toward an audience whose heads were much higher up in the philosophical clouds than ours. Upon dropping the website URL into Voyant, it became obvious that Healy was primarily focused on one thing in his writing: the graph he’d made, as demonstrated by the word cloud below.
Apart from admiring all the colorful dots and crisscrossed lines of Healy’s graph, there wasn’t much for us to glean from the website, so we started branching our discussion off into other areas of study that Voyant might be useful for. We focused particularly on researching legal cases, and how Voyant would make it exceptionally easy to sort through legal files, precedents, and other related documents to find correlations between cases. If we wanted to compare different cases of domestic abuse, for example, we would simply have to plop a handful of files into Voyant to find the ones that would help us the most. So if anyone ever needs to write a research paper about legal proceedings, perhaps Voyant is a good place for you to start.
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