Text: The Systematic Analysis of Text
Content
Text analysis is an over-arching term for a wide variety of approaches that have in common the use of textual material as empirical information. Texts may originate from spoken language, media contents, all kinds of literary sources, policy documents, and interviews.
Textual material is one of the most used sources of empirical evidence in the social sciences, humanities and law. Yet, despite the ubiquity of text, it is not always self-evident how to analyse such material other than simply by reading it. As a consequence, much research that uses text yields too few systematic results in relation to the effort that has gone into it.
This clinic provides an overview of different ways in which textual material can be systematically analysed, the application of these approaches in different social sciences, the assumptions involved, and their requirements in terms of practical procedures and computer software.
This clinic aims to provide a wide-ranging overview of different methods and approaches in textual analysis, identify the specific aims and assumptions of various approaches, and compare their merits and problems. It will also discuss how textual information can be linked to other kinds of data, how to choose specific analysis models for text, how to maintain consistency when doing textual analysis, and how to assess the validity and reliability of human or machine coding. The clinic will cover corpus linguistics and computer-aided content analysis, frame analysis, and discourse analysis.
This clinic will be supplemented with online learning materials which can be accessed after the event.
Prerequisites
Introductory understanding of statistics, e.g. the mean, standard deviation and standard error of a variable. If you are attending the clinic as part of our Researcher Development Initiative then you automatically fulfil the prerequisites.