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Textual Analysis

A Report for Comm 311Qualitative Research MethodsBy Mae Urtal Caralde

+What is Textual Analysis

■It is a method---a data gathering process—to understand the ways in which members of various cultures and subcultures make sense of who they are, and how they fit into the world they live. (McKee,p.1)

■is the method communication researchers use to describe and interpret the characteristics of a recorded or visual message.(Frey et.al.)

+Purpose

Answers 2 major questions:

What is the nature of communication?

How is communication related to other variables?

• Describe the content, structure, and functions of the messages contained in the text.

• Meaning can be identified with the producer, consumer or interpreter of the text

(Frey et.al.,1999)

+ Acquiring Texts

transcripts or outputs of communication

outputs of communication are more readily available than transcripts.

a) scripted, unscripted, public and private

b) Indirect or direct observation

use of indirect observation makes textual analysis relatively nonreactive or unobtrusive

Archival comm research

+How do we judge those different ways of making sense of the world?

Responses

1. REALIST My culture has got it right. It simply describes reality. Other cultures are wrong

2. STRUCTURALIST All these cultures seem to be making sense of the world differently; but really, underneath, they have common structures. They’re not all that different; people across the world are basically the same

3. POST-STRUCTURALIST

All these cultures do indeed make sense of the world differently; and it is impossible to say that one is right and other wrong. People from different cultures experience reality differently.

+Approaches to Textual Analysis

1. Rhetorical criticism

2. Content analysis

3. Interaction analysis

4. Performance studies

+Rhetorical Criticism

associated with Aristotle’s definition: “the available means of persuasion” and criticism is the “systematic process of illuminating and evaluating products of human activity”

is a systematic method for describing, analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating the persuasive force of messages embedded within texts.

+Types of Rhetorical Criticism

Historical Criticism

Oral Histories

Historical Case Studies

Biographical Studies

Social Movement Studies

Neo-Aristotelian Criticism

■Genre Criticism (Forensic, Epideictic, deliberative)

■Dramatistic Criticism

■Metaphoric criticism

■Narrative Criticism

■ Fantasy Theme Analysis

■ Feminist Criticism

+Content Analysis

used to identify, enumerate, and analyze occurrences of specific messages and message characteristics embedded in texts.

1. Qualitative Content Analysis: Researchers are more interested in the meanings associated with messages than with the number of times message variables occur.

2. Quantitative Content Analysis is the systematic, step-by-step procedure used to answer research questions and test hypothesis.

+Quantitative Content-Analytic Procedure

Selecting texts

Determining units to be coded

Developing content categories

Training observer to code units

Analyzing the data

+Interaction Analysis (Conversation)

interaction as a complex accomplishment that requires much knowledge on the part of individual communicators and the ability to coordinate behavior with others.

focus on a number of characteristics including:

1. Linguistic features: Studies range from the analysis of particular words and sentence components (verbs), to nonverbal features (eye contact & touch), to more interpretive aspects of language (powerful vs. powerless speech).

2. Content---Types of topics that people talk about.

3. The purposes of specific actions and utterances in an interaction.

+ Interaction Analysis (Conversation)

Involves 2 general tasks: Obtaining a sample of interaction, and analyzing that sample.

Obtaining sample of interaction

• Type: Will it be any interaction or a specific interaction? natural and unstructured or structured? Real or hypothetical?

• Location: Will it be in a laboratory, in interactants’ homes or offices, or in some publicly accessible place

• Means for gathering data: Audiotaping, videotaping, observational notes taken by researchers and questionnaires answered by respondents.

Analyzing

• Specific analysis depends on whether the goal is to describe interaction or relate it to other variables. It also depends on the form the data take

+Performance studies

The process of dialogic engagement with one’s own and other’s aesthetics communication through performance

Use of own voices and bodies as tools of exploration

Selecting

Playing

Testing

Choosing

Repeating

Presenting

+How to decide which text to analyzeTYPES OF TEXTS:

1. Primary text—the original information that forms the basis of the textual analysis (ex. Particular film, sitcom, magazine etc)

2. Secondary text---the analytical or descriptive studies that use as evidence the original information you are studying (ex. Academic literature around a subject)

3. Relevant intertexts---a.)other text in the series; b.) other texts in the genre; c.) explicit intertexts; and d.) dominant discourses in the culture where the text is circulating

+Analyzing text

■ Break down the text

a) Into its component signs or units of meanings

b) Focus on the relationship between the physical part of the sign (signifier) and what the sign signifies (signified)—how each part of the sign makes meaning

+Tips for breaking down the text:■ signs do not merely comment on things in the world;

they are things in the world; for example, street signs, clothing or parts of a magazine

■ signs are also units of meaning: they produce meanings

■ signs can produce many meanings, not just one per sign. We call this spread of possible signifieds connotations . The most stable and verifiable of these we call the denotation

■ signs are social : they require an audience to function, and often hail this audience by addressing them in some way.

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Encoding texts

■ Open texts—texts that have many possible meanings

> the more complex the text, the more ‘open’ it will be

■ Closed texts---texts that focus on a specific meaning and permit little space for the reader to generate a variety of interpretations

> the simpler the text, the more ‘closed’ it will be

+Ways to determine whether ‘open’ or ‘closed’ text

Anchorage

• the tying down

• of an image text (through

• a caption) or a written text

• (through a headline) to a

• certain meaning.

Metaphor

• an implicit or• explicit

comparison between

• signs where the qualities

• of one are transferred to

• another.

Metonymy

• the standing in of a part or element of a text

• for the whole.

+Framing the text

■ 2 Dimensions:

1. The frame of the text is the way the text is presented to us

2. The context is where the text is located, and how it is encountered by use.

+Seeing dominant discourses

■ Structuring absences: elements in the text that have meaning despite or because they have been left out.

> always be aware of what is absent from the text as much what is there

Exnomination-- the process by which dominant ideas become so obvious they don’t draw attention to themselves; instead they just seem like common sense

Commutation test– the replacement of one element of a text with another, to see how this affects how meaning is made.

+Context

■ the time in which the text was created

■ the type of media product in which the text is located

■ where the media text is placed in that product; for example, is it located toward the front of a newspaper or magazine? or does it go to air during prime time or late at night?

■ the country of origin (and reception) for the text

■ the industry responsible for the text’s creation

+Intertexts

■ intertexts are interrelated, interdependent texts that relate to either primary or secondary texts, and can inform us about how meaning is made from the primary text.

■ logic of representation in the mediasphere is intertextual, because social and political significance cannot be achieved through reading a single text16. How to decide which text to analyze

+ Basic steps in doing textual analysis

Write down topics about culture and how people make sense of the world

Focus your question to be more specific

Find more texts by doing research, both academic and popular

Find relevant intertexts; gather the texts

Gain as much sense as you can of the wider ‘semiosphere’; gain sense of context

Write down topics about culture and how people make sense of the world

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References:

Frey, L., Botan, C., & Kreps, G. (1999). Investigating communication: An introduction to research methods. (2nd ed.) Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

McKee, Allan (2003). Textual Analysis: A Beginner’s Guide. Boston Publication.

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