Voyant Tools and Descriptive Metadata: A Case Study in How Automation Can Compliment Expertise Knowledge

Abstract

This article examines the use of Voyant Tools, an open-source online application that assists users in the analysis of digital texts through data visualization, by a cataloger, a metadata librarian, and an archivist tasked with creating subject metadata for an archival collection of Congressional correspondence. By sending a digitized, OCR-ed corpus through Voyant Tools’s multiple analytic tools, the information professionals were able to determine and verify what the collection was about and extract a consistent, clean set of keywords to help create metadata and subject headings for the collection. The results generated by this method created deeper knowledge of the collection for the information professionals who steward the collection as well as future researchers of the collection.