Computer-Assisted Textual Data Analysis. How Complex Thought and a Relational Approach can Feed some Methodological Considerations
This article explores two methodological concerns related to data-mining or text analytics: 1) the danger of “decontextualizing” ideas as a consequence of quantifying textual data; and, 2) the importance of determining the historical context and the origins of a document prior to analysis. 11 020 articles that appear in Canadian and French periodicals in 2005 were data-mined by a program called SPAD. We conclude that the program responds well to the first concerns. SPAD allows researchers to produce factor analyses of textual data while preserving access to the original text. This in turn ensures that researchers can understand the “meaning” of the words that are analyzed. Our case study does not do so well in regards to the second methodological consideration though, as we present how difficult it is to pre-establish the historical context and the origins of each document with such a large sample. To understand how we were still able to pursue our meta-analysis, in spite these difficulties, we turned to theoretical principals proposed by relational research and complex systems theory.