Digital Humanities applications like Voyant and other text analysis programs are one of the most interesting tools in the toolkit of the scholar in the Digital Humanities. These applications allow researchers to see, understand, and interpret trends in language and other extremely valuable data points to understand the production and modification of language use over time. While it is certainly evident by examining any of the sample figures Sinclair presents that these tools allow scholars and researchers to see literature or the humanities in general on a macro level for, perhaps, the first time in history, the focus on the charts and graphs as relevant data to be mined or studied, over looks a extremely valuable aspect of these word analysis machines.

One of the most interesting tools that Sinclair mentioned is the TextArc interface. This interface “is less about allowing the user to generate different visualizations based on specified parameters and more about representing the text in a novel way” and because of this, I feel that Sinclair is aware of the artistic value of text as representation. It seems that Kelly is also aware of the larger cultural focus on the mathematical or scientific approach to all things, “among the many things I’ve learned form my students … is that they can be pretty persistent in their belief that words have been used in much the same way over time … and that words or phrases that are common today were probably common in the past—assuming those words existed.” Kelly has stumbled upon a reality that prevents many people from seeing the poetry, the art, the beauty of the gathering of words.

I would love to have some of these word charts, graphs, etc hanging from my wall.