of the corpus rather than extraneous factors. Words with low frequencies are omitted and the text is further distilled by the use of lemmatisation which reduces the variety of language. Researchers use Alceste when they have grounds to assume that there is a structure within a corpus that this software will expose. The researcher need only prepare the corpus for analysis by the Alceste programme by making some minor editing amendments. Whilst Alceste is a French software package and it produces outputs in that language, it covers a range of different language dictionaries, including English. Researchers have used the package in a variety of areas where the objective is to explore themes within different contexts. Early application of this software was mostly in the fields of psychological investigation and linguistic analysis. Reinert (1993), for example, analysed nightmares reported by French adolescents, Reinert, Bonnon, and Therme (1995) conducted a discourse analysis of a team of physicians who undertook an expedition to Mount Sajama to understand different approaches to the psychological adaptation to extreme environments. Lahlou (1996, 1998) analysed interviews and encyclopaedia entries referring to eating. The use of Alceste has now broadened out to other disciplines such as political science and anthropology. Alceste was selected rather than other text-mining software. One of the reasons for this is based on the use of the package to examine corpora with similar structures and research objectives. This thesis is informed by the ways in which other researchers have applied this software package both in conference presentation papers and peer-reviewed publications. The Text-Mining and the Particular Contribution of “Social Science Alceste” Conference held at the LSE in June 2010 provided a forum for participants to discuss their application of the software package and identify methodological matters for further consideration. Schonhardt-Bailey in her session explained that Alceste identified the thematic priorities in the corpus and helps the researcher to understand the framing of the object of study by mapping text onto paradigms or ideas. In this paper, Schonhardt-Bailey, Yager and Lahlou (2010) explained how they used Alceste to analyse the differences and similarities in the political speech discourses of President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
of the corpus rather than extraneous factors. Words with low frequencies are omitted and the text is further distilled by the use of lemmatisation which reduces the variety of language. Researchers use Alceste when they have grounds to assume that there is a structure within a corpus that this software will expose. The researcher need only prepare the corpus for analysis by the Alceste programme by making some minor editing amendments. Whilst Alceste is a French software package and it produces outputs in that language, it covers a range of different language dictionaries, including English. Researchers have used the package in a variety of areas where the objective is to explore themes within different contexts. Early application of this software was mostly in the fields of psychological investigation and linguistic analysis. Reinert (1993), for example, analysed nightmares reported by French adolescents, Reinert, Bonnon, and Therme (1995) conducted a discourse analysis of a team of physicians who undertook an expedition to Mount Sajama to understand different approaches to the psychological adaptation to extreme environments. Lahlou (1996, 1998) analysed interviews and encyclopaedia entries referring to eating. The use of Alceste has now broadened out to other disciplines such as political science and anthropology. Alceste was selected rather than other text-mining software. One of the reasons for this is based on the use of the package to examine corpora with similar structures and research objectives. This thesis is informed by the ways in which other researchers have applied this software package both in conference presentation papers and peer-reviewed publications. The “Social Science Text-Mining and the Particular Contribution of Alceste” Conference held at the LSE in June 2010 provided a forum for participants to discuss their application of the software package and identify methodological matters for further consideration. Schonhardt-Bailey in her session explained that Alceste identified the thematic priorities in the corpus and helps the researcher to understand the framing of the object of study by mapping text onto paradigms or ideas. In this paper, Schonhardt-Bailey, Yager and Lahlou (2010) explained how they used Alceste to analyse the differences and similarities in the political speech discourses of President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
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