4.2 Terms Berry Tool!

If I could point you, though, to another tool SIMILAR to the word cloud, but so much cooler and more expansive, I’d suggest you take a peek at “TermsBerry”. This tool is taking the same concept that the word cloud embraces, presenting a visualization of the main word coming up in the corpus, but it does it more reflexively. When you hover over a word, as you can see below, the word highlights OTHER words in the corpus it is related to. This allows you to track connections across the text, as well as visualize the main themes or topics of conversation. It is adding collocates data, or words that appear together in the text. This tool essentially visualizes high-frequency terms, like the word cloud, but adds the utility of engaging with how those same terms co-occur (which Voyant describes as to what extent they appear in proximity with one another). Voyant, by default, sets this pairing data; it will show you in highlighting other related words as appearing either two words to the left or two words to the right within the corpus. If you don’t feel like this is inclusive enough, which it might not be depending on your text, you can use the “Context” sliding bar at the bottom of the tool to increase the number of spaces accepted between terms that are still connected as collacates.

The default is top terms; I usually shift to distinct terms because I find those more interesting to my research, but look at both and see which results you’d rather engage with. On the bottom of the tool, under “Strategy”, you can shift this to “Distinct Words”. Next to that, you’ll see a sliding bar for the number of terms, which I would say you should scale up regardless of your project, as you have seen me do. The last sliding bar adjusts the scale from which the tool is considering to pull related words from the corpora, which, for my research, I ended up leaving alone. The first image below is a picture of the tool, and the second image shows where you can adjust the scale and other sliding bars at the bottom of the tool, zoomed in for you.

Here is the terms berry in action, so when you hover over a specific term, here is how it highlights collacate data. You can see here the difference between a word highly related in the corpus, such as “Women”, compared to a word less connected to the full corpus, such as “nation”.