This week I’ve been trying to work through some of the future steps in creating this interactive environment and how I can include really neat information. I have been playing with Voyant tools and the idea of visualizing words. I decided that it would be interesting to take eleven hymns that I have been working with and put those through the program. I say I have been working with these hymns, but what I have been doing is sitting with the recordings of them, the green hymnal that many tribal members use, and my noise-reducing headphones to make sure I type out the Comanche phonetics and the English (general) translation as best as I can then hunt down a QR code for each song all in one document. My hope is that eventually, I can create my own hymnal version that can be used as a reference to the tunes of the songs as well as be an accurate source for learning the language through song.
So I used the eleven hymns and Voyant to visually see the most used words from the hymns. The link to my Voyant search is below. I will say that I did have to edit in a few stopwords so that my word cloud would be accurate. I had to delete some of the descriptive words I used for my QR code for the hymnal users, the names of individuals in the youtube video links for the codes, and the name of the church where the majority of the videos were made. Besides that, I feel like the Voyant program gave an interesting take on what our hymns visually look like and the terms that are most important or I suppose most prevalent.
Within the program, I really enjoyed the Cirrus word clouds. I absolutely love that I can use as many words as I want to make the cloud more or less detailed. I think that really put the ideas of close-reading and distant-reading into perspective. Secondly, the bubble lines were really fun. I love all of the interactive colorful pieces of the program. The bubble lines were really interesting because I was able to see the frequency of the unique words in a very clear way. The hovering to see frequency was a convenient and smart move especially if I were using this for quantitative research. Finally, I love the Termsberry options! I think that it can be so important seeing the Comanche words in a context. This allowed me to be able to get a good idea of the phrases instead of single words within the project.
Overall I had a lot of fun playing with the Voyant tool, I feel like I would like to do this again in the future when I can take the English words out completely and that might look a little differently. I also would like to try this program out with a couple of our written stories and see what that looks like. I think that those repetitive words and phrases can really say a lot about how we view the world, so seeing them in older writings might be really interesting. I hope you enjoy my little exploration into visual hymns!
Numunu Family Tree 
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