Abstract

Stéfan Sinclair, the lead of Voyant Tools (voyant-tools.org), passed away in 2020 leaving the project without a succession plan. As Sinclair’s collaborator I inherited development and maintenance of the tool. In this presentation I will talk about the Voyant Consortium that number of us created as a mechanism for engaging the community interested in Voyant in its future. I will also discuss what I think still needs to be done before the Voyant Consortium can be self-sustaining.

Brief Bios

Dr. Geoffrey Martin Rockwell is a Professor of Philosophy and Digital Humanities at the University of Alberta. He presently holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute. He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto and has published on subjects such as artificial intelligence and ethics, philosophical dialogue, textual visualization and analysis, digital humanities, instructional technology, computer games and multimedia. His books include Hermeneutica, co-authored with Stéfan Sinclair (MIT Press, 2016). Hermeneutica is part of a hybrid text and tool project with Voyant Tools (voyant-tools.org), an award-winning suite of analytical tools.

Michael Sinatra is Professor of Digital Humanities at the Université de Montréal. Trained in Romanticism at Oxford and a specialist in Leigh Hunt, he has been involved in digital publishing and the digital humanities for twenty-five years. He is one of the founding members of the Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur les humanités numériques (CRIHN) and has been directing it since its inception in 2013. He is currently the co-chair of centerNet: An international network of digital humanities centers (2022-2026), and was the President of ADHO: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations in 2024-2025, the global digital humanities organization comprising 13 member institutions.

Please see 'Notes' below for any suggested/official citation information added by the author(s) of this work. Otherwise, you can cite the HSS Commons instance of this publication as follows:

• Rockwell, G. M., Sinatra, M., (2026), "Building a Consortium for a Sustainable Voyant", HSSCommons: (DOI: 10.25547/7S78-VP91)

  Copy Citation | Export metadata as... | JSON | CSV | RO-Crate | BibTex | EndNote

1. project management
2. project transition
3. succession
4. text analysis
5. transitions and succession
6. voyant
7. voyant consortium