Computer-assisted textual discourse analysis and textometric softwares: Critical and prospective reflections via a modeling of fundamental analytical procedures
Noting the focus of the French tradition in discourse analysis on textometric softwares, the author attempts to model the fundamental processes underlying the analyst-text interaction distinguishing the modes, operations, dimensions, granularity, contextuality and temporalities of the process, and so, with or without recourse to computer processing. Based on this modeling, textometric softwares show that the assistance of the researcher is often a matter of bringing to display, through queries-retrieval, automatic assignments and representations, textual and extra-textual data, but rarely a matter of assisting the researcher in his working of the text (e.g. customized annotations, multiplicity of reading layers, corpus evolution) to produce and construct meaning by his or her analysis traces in an integrated environment. The origins of this trend are discussed as well as directions for future developments.