Text analysis by Voyant Tools

I chose the book “Historical Sketches of the South” and uploaded its content to Voyant Tools. This is my output:

The second graph shows that the words “negro” and “slave” appears frequently, which directly and clearly reflects the topic of the book: slavery and its impact on the African American community. This quantified evidence can make one feel the weight of this historical issue more strongly than just reading it. Also, the first graph shows the link between words. For instance,words “Africa” and “America” coexist and interweave throughout the entire text. This visually represents the central tragedy of the Tarkar people: their violent removal from their homeland and their precarious existence in a new, forced identity. Through Voyant Tool, after reading the book, readers can intuitively feel the power of words and what authors want to reveal through the whole text.

Although AI provides people a powerful method to quantify words, it is a double-edged sword. First, Although it shows the frequency of occurrence of words, but it cannot show the how this words impact each other, or the specific function of the word in the context. Take “law” for example. Although this words appears a lot of time, the Voyant Tools cannot show that whether these laws used to maintain slavery or to attempt to abolish it. The tools just can provide some cold numbers, but the hidden meaning of the words just can be explained by people and just can felt by people with heart. Second, AI cannot fully understand human words. It might overlook irony, metaphor, subtle tone and narrative silence. Accordingly, AI just can be a auxiliary means for people to easily analyze the text but cannot replace people, since the key tools for people to understand the words are their critical thinking and human nature.