Alternative to Voyant Tools - Text Visualization Software

Posted Friday, April 25, 2025.

Voyant is a powerful text analysis and visualization tool that is used for analyzing text corpus, visualizing the main concepts and topical trends within.

InfraNodus text analysis tool can be used as an alternative to Voyant. It is a much more powerful platform because it uses text network analysis under the hood, can detect topical clusters, visualize the main themes in a document, identify common patterns across different documents, help discover content gaps, and has a built-in AI for ideation.

The text visualizations generated by InfraNodus are fully interactive, so you can use them to explore the texts, remove or filter concepts and topics to see how it affects the discourse, export the data, and share your findings online or via high-resolution SVG vector images suitable for publications.

Take a look at the features in the table below that we offer right out of the box to help you get started easily.

Looking for a Voyant Tools alternative? Try InfraNodus!

Voyant Tools vs InfraNodus

In order to compare the two products, we will use the first chapter of "Alice in Wonderland" as well as a short text by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben "Magic and Happinness". Let's see what we can get from this chapter using the both tools.

Voyant Tools: Temporal Analysis

We can upload the text file to Voyant and it will visualize a tag cloud, the text editor, and a timeline for the top terms and concepts.

 

The most useful feature in Voyant, in our opinion, is the timeline of terms. It shows how the frequency of terms changes throughout the narrative, which useful for finding relevant parts of content. We can click on the timeline and find the part of the discourse with the highest term frequency and use the collocates table to see which other terms occur in the same context.

This can be especially useful when comparing several documents at once. Using the collocates table, you can see how the terms are distributed among different documents, which can be quite useful for studying literature or interviews.

 

While Voyant Tools offers valuable insights, particularly from a temporal perspective, it has limitations. The lack of automatic topical clustering and AI interpretation capabilities means users often need to engage in extensive analysis workflows to uncover meaningful connections between texts. This process can be time-consuming and may not always yield the most efficient or comprehensive analysis. However, for researchers seeking a unique view on textual data, especially in terms of how concepts evolve over time, Voyant Tools can still be a useful resource in their analytical toolkit.

 

InfraNodus: Explore the Context, See What's Missing

Now we can visualize the same text in InfraNodus. The first difference we can see is that InfraNodus shows the main topical clusters and clearly shows us which terms co-occur in the same context. So instead of having to look for colocations manually or referring to a tag cloud (that doesn't have any context), you can see see the main topics and the context for every term in the graph:

 

Using the new InfraNodus 3D browser plugin, you can then see how these topics evolved over time and reveal the trending topics — clusters of ideas that tend to increase in urgency towards the end of the discourse. You can also filter the discourse by topics and explore the content in detail based on your particular selections:

 

We can also use InfraNodus to compare different texts. For instance, if we import the other text — Magic and Happinness — we can then use the text compare function to see commonalities between these texts: what are the similar terms and those terms co-occurrences that they share.

 

There are multiple other features in InfraNodus that are not available in Voyant Tools. Here are some of the most important ones.

Identifying the Content Gaps in Text and Proposing Research Questions

One of the most important features in InfraNodus is the ability to identify the content gaps and blind spots in text. InfraNodus will highlight the topical clusters that are not yet well connected and use the built-in AI to propose an interesting research question to think of to bridge the gap:

 

Sentiment Analysis: See What the Positive Statements Are About

InfraNodus has a powerful sentiment analysis module based on the Google NLP Cloud API. It detects positive, negative, or neutral sentiment in multiple languages and can be used to filter statements by emotional tone. When combined with topical analysis, this becomes a particularly useful feature for identifying the concepts or topics associated with positive or negative statements, especially valuable for interview analysis and customer feedback research.

 

Interactive Knowledge Graph: Explore the Context Around a Certain Term

You can highlight a specific term to explore the surrounding relationships and conceptual pathways. Alternatively, you can remove it to recalculate the topical clusters and reveal what the primary themes in the text would be in its absence.

 

Using AI to Get Insights from the Graph

You can use the built-in AI to generate summaries and research questions or new ideas based on the graph structure. You can also access the underlying knowledge graph and use it in your own LLM workflows with InfraNodus' GraphRAG API.

 

Entity Extraction and Knowledge Graphs

You can extract entities from text and construct knowledge graphs that encode relations between these entities as a network. Each relation contains a rich description of the link between the entities and can be used to provide additional context.

 

Narrative Propagation and Cognitive Variability

InfraNodus has a built-in cognitive variability modulator, which is based on the text's structure and propagation of influence in the text's narrative. If the text is too focused on central concepts, InfraNodus will recommend to disrupt it and to explore the periphery. If the text is too dispersed, InfraNodus will recommend to focus on specific concepts or bridge the structural gaps. This can be very useful for writing, thinking, and ideation.

 

 

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