Today I am messing around with the communist manifesto on Voyant Tools, I used the manifesto because I do not think I have read it prior and because the uploading a PDF feature was not working very well, so it was easier to just copy and paste the manifesto. The most frequent words used are: class, bourgeois, bourgeoise, society, proletariat. I am surprised that the actual words communist and communism are not used very much considering the density of the manifesto having over 11,000 words. The phrases used the most are: more and more, and has, capital is, and feudal society, appear to be said the most in the entire manifesto.
If I was thinking like a historian it would be very useful to look into the frequency of words as aforementioned and if I really wanted to get into the minutia also under what chapters does it appear the most, if bourgeois appears more in chapter 2 versus 4 and look into why that is or the context of it. The traps of this type of data is that you can get lost in the common words such as “The” but it was taken out from the numbers, and also unfortunately frequent words can also not be that relevant to what I am researching because it depends on the scope of my research. It also can be incredibly helpful if I was looking for a very specific word which relates to some research like the name of someone or an event that is seldomly mentioned in the work. It would be incredibly useful when sourcing through massive sources of text which would take a lot of time to get through but with the phrase features and word features it would help cut research time drastically. I believe we lose the actual connection to the sources in a way, because if we do not actually read or skim the sources due to just using distance tools we could lose valuable information or other helpful materials that do not appear as blatant through just reoccurring words or phrases. I do not see my self truly using it to research papers currently with the type of work I have to do, but this could change if some work just seems perfect for it, same with the google trend option of words in literature when we used it in class to see the possible reasons for the spikes in usage. I also am not that well versed in understanding all of the numbers and results given to me so there could be other benefits I am not seeing that could help with research as a historian, but the advantage of seeing the prevalence of topics, words, and so on is very helpful in either deep research or preliminary by not wasting time reading a source that could not be useful.