I read your Voyant analysis of Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House," and I think we almost pick the same tools that we believe to be crucial for our text analysis. Like you, I mostly visualize my chosen literary work with Cirrus, Terms, Berry, and Trends. I also use links to ?look into how these words are used interdependently to contextualize the story told. I also had difficulty understanding how functions like Topics would benefit my understanding of the texts on a layered and complex level. I checked and thought maybe the problem was with the word count of the document. By default setting, Topics generates the first 1000 words in a document, and A Doll's House has 26210 words. In order to use this tool in the most efficient way possible, you can try to use the Topics slider ( the scroll bar) to adjust the number of topics you want to generate (max is 200). I have read A Doll's House before, so I couldn't speak for those who haven't. However, the clusters of chosen terms hint to me that this fiction deals with bureaucracy and finance via repeated words like "works," "money," and "paper." I can also recognize some words classified as names, so many characters are involved in the story.
There is also a vague clue of the story's setting, which is during the winter season, from the repetition of the word "Christmas." It appears that someone is getting angry at someone for their wrongdoings, and this drama occurs in a family. While Topics cannot give me a complete storyline, it gives me a good chunk of puzzles to piece together the core gist of the story. It happened to me when I analyzed Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Words like "whale," "sea," "sailor," and "chase" allowed me to make a reasonable assumption that there was a group of sailors that went after a giant whale in the sea. I still prefer to use other tools, but that was how I utilized Topics for my knowledge of the text. I agree that text with more literal content, like self-help books, would definitely yield better results with Voyant Tools' Topics.