Voyant Tools vs. Kepler vs. Palladio
Over this last unit, my peers and I were required to work with a few different text analysis and geospatial softwares: Voyant Tools, Kepler, and Palladio. Each of these softwares is different, so I’m going to run through my particular pros and cons from each.
Voyant Tools is text analysis, while it can show you where information comes from in the data on graphs, it will not map that data for you. Despite not being useful for mapping, it creates really cool word clouds, graphs, and highlights the text where certain words or phrases appear. It’s really helpful for showing how common certain words are compared to others, but doesn’t graph demographic information. I did run into a snag where the online servers for Voyant tools went down for a day or two while I was working on it, which was definitely frustrating, but if I had wanted to, there is a downloadable Voyant application that would have been unaffected by the server being down, but I’ve heard the online app has more functions and is less prone to crashing.
Kepler is a geospatial mapping application. It’s got tons of functions, tons of different graph types. One of the primary benefits from Kepler is the ability to upload your own maps which you can graph the data onto. In addition, you can embed Kepler maps and graphs into other applications. For instance, I’ve got a simple Kepler map on my post about using Kepler. If Voyant tools had a snag when I worked on it, Kepler had a tear, there is a bug that sometimes doesn’t allow you to download maps as image files, which is problematic. I ended up having to send a bug report to the company that makes Kepler and they were able to confirm that it wasn’t functioning as intended. I was able to find a work around by taking screenshots of my map, but I still count this as a negative about the program.
Palladio had a really cool type of graph where it reduces concepts, people, jobs, locations (whatever filters you have) to these circles that can change size depending on how many of that category you have, and then it draws lines between the circles (the circles are actually called points in the software and the lines are connections). I actually liked the circles more than I thought after some consideration, in some cases the maps are better, but also sometimes the circles are better. One problem with this connections graph is that sometimes the data is so jumbled that it all just looks like one big mass of circles and the connections are covered in other circles. Palladio was the first of these programs to work as intended. Which might be saying a lot, except for the fact that the user-interface has a much more complicated learning curve that probably frustrated me just as much as the other programs. I’m not naturally a patient person, and I don’t necessarily have a innate talent for geospatial analysis (in fact, I think I don’t have talent at all for it) so I’d much prefer a program that both doesn’t have bugs and is easy to understand which buttons to press to accomplish each task. One suggestion I would have for improving the UI would be that if there is a problem where you can’t graph something it could highlight the empty field you need to fill for it to work (which is sometimes hidden on another minimized tab completely). While I do complain about how difficult Palladio’s UI is, it is a remarkable software with a lot of options. Kinda like playing the city builder strategy game City Skylines, there’s so many things to do that you can’t tell what’s going wrong and where to address it.
All together these programs are pretty great. They’re all free and powerful softwares. I personally don’t find them easy to use, but I can see potential applications of why people would want to invest time into learning them.
My Favorite: It wouldn’t be a comparative review without saying what my favorite is. Voyant: it’s probably Voyant. I have a hard time telling information from maps, and I really like looking at the word clouds and hovering over them to see how frequently certain words were used. If I had to actually pick a mapping software, I would probably choose Palladio. It’s a tough call.
If you want to get into geospatial or textual analysis digital history, try some of these out and let me know which one is your favorite.
