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Sharing What You Did: Documenting Text Analysis Research with Voyant and Spyral - Session 2

Date
January 16, 2026
Time
12:00 p.m. - 1:30 p.m. ET
Sharing What You Did: Documenting Text Analysis Research with Voyant and Spyral - Session 2
Location
Online via Zoom
Open To
All Bridging Divides researchers, affiliates, partners, students and staff
Register for Sharing What You Did: Documenting Text Analysis Research with Voyant and Spyral - Session 2 (external link) 

Check the time of the event in different time zones:
9:00AM - 10:30AM (PST)
10:00AM - 11:30AM (MST)
12:00PM - 1:30PM (EST)

Register  (external link, opens in new window) 
Training session: Voyant fundamentals
Logos of Bridging Divides and partner universities

This training session is hosted by Bridging Divides and open to all BD researchers, affiliated researchers, HQPs, partners, and staff. The training is co-facilitated by Geoffrey Rockwell and Augustine Farnola, University of Alberta.

Note: Session 2 is the second session of a three-part course. Participants are encouraged to attend all classes in order.

More about the course

Voyant (voyant-tools.org (external link) ) is a text analysis and visualization environment that is free and easy to use. It works in the browser, so there is nothing to install and has a collection of tools from text mining to visualization tools with which to study a text or collection of texts. Spyral (voyant-tools.org/spyral (external link) ) is a notebook programming environment that extends Voyant so you can document your research and share it so others can rerun or adapt your queries.

In this three part workshop we will:

  1. Session 1: January 9, 2025
    Introduce Voyant and show how you can automatically export any result in Voyant to a Spyral Notebook without writing any code.
  2. Session 2: January 16, 2025
    Show how you can add and edit text and code cells to create a notebook that documents a project. Show how to manage Spyral notebooks, creating new ones and deleting old ones. Show how to call any Voyant tool and control its parameters.
  3. Session 3: January 23, 2025
    Look at examples of Spyral notebooks and see how to copy the code you need from examples or the online help. Discuss the design of a notebook.

No prior experience with Voyant or Spyral is required. Each of the sessions will take an hour followed by an informal half-hour for questions and discussion. Participants are encouraged to develop a real project at the end of the workshop.

To that end, participants will be able to book individual consultations with Geoffrey Rockwell and his graduate students to flesh out their project. Our goal is that participants who take advantage of the workshops and consultations will have a working project they can build on.

Course schedule

The training is led by Geoffrey Rockwell, Professor of Philosophy and Digital Humanities at the University of Alberta, Amii (Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute) Fellow, Canada CIFAR AI Chair and Bridging Divides researcher.