Voyant tools as an analysis instrument of Pierre-louis le Roy’s text

Abstract

The paper aims to describe the results of the application of IT technologies for the analysis of fiction text in the context of the ubiquitous digitalisation of education. The aim of the paper is to develop an understanding of the functionality and value of Voyant Tools as a potential research tool. The authors present their own approach to the implementation of Voyant Tools in the process of analysing a fiction text remote in time from the modern reader. The toolkit has been applied to the analysis of an 18th-century fiction text. Its author is the French academic P.L. Le Roy, the book "Adventures of four Russian sailors to the island of Spitsbergen brought by a storm, where they lived for six years and three months" (1766). The text was chosen because of its detective history in Russia and the participation of famous historical figures in the storey. Among them were Empress Elizabeth, M.V. Lomonosov, Empress Catherine, Count P.I. Shuvalov, S.S. Vernizober, the manager of the fur-fishing industry in Arkhangelsk, and shipowner A. Kornilov, etc. There are comparatively few special studies related to this text. Attracting a modern IT-tool to work with the text leads: first, to activation of reader's attention to the work, second, to mastering of ICT-competences within the school course "Native (Russian) literature", third, allows making interesting observations on the text regarding the characteristics of the writer's world picture, key words and images in his style, fourth, visualizes information in the form of generating "word cloud", text concordance, graphing the contextual relationships of words, showing relevant text features.