<p><strong>Introduction</strong></p> <p>Voyant&rsquo;s Reader tool is a large scale document reader that allows you to view and search all of the documents within a given corpus. This simple, web-based tool allows you to load and view multiple URLs or text files simultaneously.</p> <p><strong>Navigation</strong></p> <p>Reader can simply be used to scroll through a text document or corpora in a linear way. The coloured bars on the left hand side of the page correspond to the documents in the corpus. Each document is assigned a unique colour, and more bars will be shown for longer documents. Mouse over the bars to see the name of the document represented. Clicking on the first bar of a given colour will take you to the beginning of that document. Subsequent bars act as links into later sections of the document.</p> <p><img src=\"system/images/6/original/reader_navigation.png?1329537272%20\" alt=\"Reader navigation.\" width=\"324\" height=\"230\" /></p> <p><strong>Searching</strong></p> <p>You can keyword search by entering a term into the textbox at the bottom of the screen. Suggestions for similar terms in the document will automatically be generated. Only one term can be searched at a time, and truncation is not available. This means that a search for the word &ldquo;graphic&rdquo; will not return instances of the word &ldquo;graphics&rdquo;.</p> <p><img src=\"system/images/5/original/reader_keyword.png?1329536989\" alt=\"Keyword selection.\" width=\"337\" height=\"298\" /></p> <p>All instances of your keyword will be highlighted in the document, so they can be easily identified as you scroll through. You can mouse over any term in the corpus to see a frequency count for that word. Once a keyword has been entered the coloured bars in the navigation menu will change to indicate which document sections contain that word. A more saturated hue indicates the presence of your keyword in that section. You should be aware that clicking on the bar will simply take you to the beginning of the indicated section, it does not take you directly to the highlighted word. In a large corpus you may have to scroll quite a long way in order to find the highlighted term. Novice users may find this behaviour confusing. It would be great to have a way to link directly to each instance of the word in the corpus.</p> <p><strong>Drawbacks</strong></p> <p>Reader is not a full-featured text analysis tool. Reader is best used in the full Voyant skin, where it allows the user to drill down into the text of a document while performing more complex analysis tasks in the surrounding tools. I found Reader to be slow when loading and navigating through large corpora. The tool occasionally froze, forcing me to click on the top blue bar to reload the corpus.</p>