My Factory of Extravagant Marvels

This post first appeared on the blog for the Centre for Privacy Studies: https://privacy.hypotheses.org/1344 If you are starting to dip your toes into the  sea of opportunities that automated text analysis gives you but were wondering where to start, take a look at Voyant Tools . This open source application lets you quickly gather some insights about texts you might be interested in. It's also very convenient to use, because it's directly available from your browser—you simply upload or copy and paste your text onto the tool, with no need to download or install software. I tested it out with a sample from a French text I am currently working with to see how it worked. My text is the first letter from the Lettres Portugaises , an epistolary novel from the second half of the 17th century, published by Claude Barbin, whose book trade is one of the topics of my research. One quick insight that became visible for me is the importance of properly configuring stop words when doing