Theoretical Foundations for Digital Text Analysis
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8975985 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gabriel Ignatow (0000-0002-8091-6726, Sociology University of North Texas 1155 Union Circle #31157 Denton Texas United States, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 46 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 104-120 |
| Publication date | 2015-02-27 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8308 • E-ISSN: 1468-5914 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/jtsb.12086 |
| OpenAlex | W2098533688 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 23 |
| References cited | 69 |
Much of social life now takes place online, and records of online social interactions are available for social science research in the form of massive digital text archives. But cultural social science has contributed little to the development of machine‐assisted text analysis methods. As a result few text analysis methods have been developed that link digital text data to theories about culture and discourse. This paper attempts to lay the groundwork for development of such methods by proposing metatheoretical and theoretical foundations suitable for machine‐assisted semantic text analysis. Metatheoretically I draw on the work of E lder‐ V ass (2012), K aidesoja (2013) and others to argue that digital text analysis methods ought to be (and in practice implicitly are) based on a realist constructionist ontology that treats discourses as ontologically real emergent social entities that have causal relationships with non‐discursive social and cognitive processes. Theoretically I follow F eldman (2006) and many others in arguing that language is fundamentally shaped by processes of embodied cognition. Researchers developing digital text analysis techniques must theoretically account for such processes if they wish to produce algorithms that can interpret texts in ways that supplement, and not only amplify, human interpretation. I critically survey contemporary text analysis methods that implicitly share these metatheoretical and theoretical positions and discuss some ways these can be further developed with newly available software
Cognitive science · Data science · Discourse analysis · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Interpretation (philosophy · Linguistics · Ontology · Social constructionism · Social science · Sociology · Strict constructionism · Artificial Intelligence · Computational and Text Analysis Methods · Computer Science · Language and cultural evolution · Psychology · Social and Cultural Dynamics
Ontologies, methodologies, and new uses of Big Data in the social and cultural sciences
Developmental Idealism in Internet Search Data
Analysis of the Thematic Structure and Discursive Framing in Articles about Trianon and the Holocaust in the Online Hungarian Press Using LDA Topic Modelling
Śmieci na wejściu, śmieci na wyjściu”. Wpływ jakości koderów na działanie sieci neuronowej klasyfikującej wypowiedzi w mediach społecznościowych
Analyzing the past, improving the future
How to prepare data for the automatic classification of politically related beliefs expressed on Twitter? The consequences of researchers’ decisions on the number of coders, the algorithm learning procedure, and the pre-processing steps on the performance of supervised models
Using Opinion Mining as an educational analytic
Research on Emergency Response Policy for Public Health Emergencies in China—Based on Content Analysis of Policy Text and PMC-Index Model
Factors influencing student mobility
Concept Class Analysis
What can cognitive neuroscience do for cultural sociology
Examining media bias and geopolitical proxy framing effects on media representations of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict in Taiwan
Measuring Cultural Diversity in Text with Word Counts
Humanistic interpretation and machine learning
What is implicit culture
Two traditions of cognitive sociology
The microbiome‐gut‐brain and social behavior
Mapping Contentious Collective Emotions in a Populist Democracy
Theoretical Foundations and Limits of Word Embeddings
Text mining for social science - The state and the future of computational text analysis in sociology
Cultural cartography with word embeddings
Paying with change
E-learning experiences in tertiary education
Deciphering violence
Cognitive Dimensions Of Social Science
Grammar and Conceptualization
Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining
The Measurement of Psychological States Through the Content Analysis of Verbal Behavior
Reinventing Evidence in Social Inquiry
Metaphors We Live By
Longing and Belonging
Social selection and peer influence in an online social network
Culture and political crisis
Explaining Embodied Cognition Results
Different Bodies, Different Minds
Perceptual symbol systems
Social mindscapes
How We Think They Think
Probabilities and Surprises
Is a “Special Psychology” of Practice Possible
Durkheimian sociology
Textual Analysis
Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society
The New American Cultural Sociology
The Causal Power of Social Structures
The Reality of Social Construction
Metaphorical constructions of hypertension among three ethnic groups in the Netherlands
New Media and the ‘Anchor Baby’ Boom
Semantic Connectivity
Speaking Together, Thinking Together? Exploring Metaphor and Cognition in a Shipyard Union Dispute
Signing in the Flesh
Mirror Neurons,” Collective Objects and the Problem of Transmission
Theories of Embodied Knowledge
Debate
The Tone of Local Presidential News Coverage
Naturalizing Critical Realist Social Ontology
Culture and agency
Affective News
Text as Data
Ways of Measuring Agency
Four Ways to Measure Culture
Introduction-Topic models
Idea hamsters" on the "bleeding edge
The Fringe Effect
Extracting culture through textual analysis
Culture and Embodied Cognition
Regularity and Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions
Social Science as Reading and Performance
The 'New American Cultural Sociology
Endogenous Explanation in the Sociology of Culture
Measuring Meaning Structures
Justifying Sociological Knowledge
The cultural environment
Sociology, narrative, and the quality versus quantity debate (Goethe versus Newton)
| Unique citing works | 23 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2,09 |
| Citation span | 2015 - 2025 (11) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 22 |