Voyant tools and R in distance reading literary analysis in Portuguese

Abstract

The present article aims to compare two distant reading tools using Portuguese literature corpora as an example. Distant reading, as defined by Franco Moretti, is a hermeneutic and methodological framework that allows for the quantitative study of large volumes of text. Voyant Tools is an open-source web platform that enables online textual analysis without the need for programming. Quanteda (Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data), on the other hand, is an R package for data mining, also open source. It was developed for R users who need to apply natural language processing to texts. To use Quanteda through R, basic programming knowledge is required. The article, therefore, seeks to compare these tools, contribute to informed choices in textual analysis tools, and provide a foundation for future research and applications in literary analysis. Additionally, the text aims to problematize the processes of modeling, analysis, and representation, which are knowledge constructions and, as such, subject to interpretation.