New subject: Content Analysis Information

28 Feb 2008

      Hi, Laura... I am in the midst of "content analysis" right this moment while preparing for my general exams in Cultural Studies/virtual ethnography.  I also have a folklore "bent" to my work as well (one of my committee members is Amy Shuman, folklorist and anthropologist in the English Dept) so you can tell that these references might be of the linguistic/narrative perspective.
1.  Michael Toolan's book:  Narrative: a Critical Linguistic Introduction 
2.  Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps' book" Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling
3.  Wm. Labov whom Toolan devotes a major chapter (ch 5) in his book: Labov's references date back to the 60s... his work is "classic" and proves a model in a couple of seminal essays. 

These are a start.. 

Nancy McDonald-Kenworthy, GA
CSTW Writing Center Tutor
www.cstw.org

----- Original Message -----
From: Laura B Nielsen <lbn4@georgetown.edu>
Date: Thursday, February 28, 2008 9:38 am
Subject: [Air-L] Content Analysis Information
...
2/25/08
TO:  Political Science Methodolgy-POLMETH 
        Association of Internet Researchers-Air-L
Please find attached the consolidated submissions from my inquiry:
“I am looking for reference material for use in my work at EPA. We 
are planning to launch a discussion board with a limited number of 
comment fields. But we also want to analyze discussion content in 
order to better understand the needs and interests of our customers-
-in particular those who come to EPA seeking environmental 
information.1) Have any of you been teaching about content analysis 
methods lately? If so, what's your favorite reference?
2) Has anyone been working on content analysis of discussion boards 
as a research method?”
Thanks to everyone for all the helpful responses!
Content Analysis Reference
3) Sent by: Harald Klein <intext@GMX.DE>  , Alexander Semenov 
<semenoffalex@googlemail.com if you are looking for an overview on 
content analysis research methodes, Klaus Krippendorff's book is 
excellent:Krippendorff, Klaus (2004): Content Analysis. An 
Introduction ot Its Methodology. Thousand Oaks. Sage. 411 pages
2) Sent by: "Callahan, Ewa S. Prof." <Ewa.Callahan@quinnipiac.edu>  
Following Alexander's note, I am a big fan of Krippendorff, especially
his method of intercoder reliability testing. For his, and other 
methodsyou can check: 
http://www.temple.edu/sct/mmc/reliability/
followed up by: 
http://www.asc.upenn.edu/usr/krippendorff/dogs.html
Content Analysis Research 
0) Sent by: Muhammad Abdul-Mageed <mumageed@yahoo.com>  
Herring, S. C. (2007). Web(log) content analysis: Expanding the 
paradigm. Submitted to J. Hunsinger, M. Allen, & L. Klastrup 
(Eds.), The International Handbook of Internet Research. Springer 
Verlag.
1) Sent by: James Honaker <tercer@UCLA.EDU>  
There is a project that is quite close to what you want at the ISI 
at USC. 
Their page, with a number of project papers and abstracts, is:
http://www.isi.edu/division3/discourse/
Their nlp goals are analysis of classroom discussion boards to 
create some degree of automated answering of student questions, 
direction 
to previous threads, and links between students with similar 
interests or 
research problems.  The project is specifically about discussion 
boards 
commonly used for class teaching, but other than the classroom 
focus it is 
very close to the subject you are seeking.
(Full disclosure, my wife worked on this project.)
2) Sent by : Henry Kim <h27kim@EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU>  
There is a group called "Dark Web" here at Univ of AZ where computer
scientists are doing content analysis on web sites connected to 
terrorismand more.  Some of the techniques they are using may be of 
use for your
purposes.
Content Analysis Teaching
1) Sent by: Kevin Guidry <krguidry@gmail.com> , Muhammad Abdul-
Mageed <mumageed@yahoo.com>  , Alexander Semenov 
<semenoffalex@googlemail.com>  
You may like to have a look at the course description, and 
syllabus, of Prof. Susan Herring in Indiana University, for her 
course titled "Content Analysis for the World Wide Web". Herring 
has been teaching it for a long time and she has been trying to 
develop methodologies for analyzing the WWW.
Web site at http://www.slis.indiana.edu/faculty/herring/.  
Specifically: http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/web.syll.06.html
The following article is her last written paper on the issue, as 
far as I know:
Herring, S. C. (2007). Web(log) content analysis: Expanding the 
paradigm. Submitted to J. Hunsinger, M. Allen, & L. Klastrup 
(Eds.), The International Handbook of Internet Research. Springer 
Verlag.
Content Analysis Software
0) Sent by: Harald Klein <intext@GMX.DE>  
An overview on text analysis software gives 
http://www.textanalysis.info
1) Sent by: Paul Kellstedt <kellstedt@politics.tamu.edu>  
I'm the co-editor of The Political Methodologist. Tyler Johnson 
wrote a
review for us of the software package WordStat, which he liked. You 
couldfind the back issue of TPM as a .pdf at the polmeth web site.
http://polmeth.wustl.edu/thepolmeth.php
2) Sent by:  Michael Evans <evans.michael@gmail.com
Over the past few years I have experimented with various methods of
computer-assisted textual data analysis, including traditional and new
approaches to content analysis. In the process, I have developed an
expertise in two particularly useful software packages produced by
Provalis Research: QDA Miner and WordStat. 
Provalis' approach is to closely integrate several methods of textual
data analysis that have traditionally (and misleadingly) been thought
of as solely "qualitative" or "quantitative." The result is a
mixed-methods approach that does not merely provide the convenience of
having several quantitative and qualitative functions in one package,
but also allows for creative synthesizing of the functions in order to
accomplish entirely new analytical tasks.  You can learn more about 
QDA Miner here
(http://www.provalisresearch.com/QDAMiner/QDAMinerDesc.html) and
WordStat here 
(http://www.provalisresearch.com/wordstat/Wordstat.html).
Related Topic – Analysis of Public Comments on Regulations 
1) Sent by: schrodt <schrodt@ku.edu> 
Contact Stuart Shulman at the University of Pittsburgh -- he has 
some 
quite sophisticated software that does this sort of thing with 
public 
input on proposed regulations, and I assume it would work for your 
project 
as well. In fact I think he has already done contract work for EPA -
- or 
at least I know he has analyzed environmental regulations 
2) Sent by: John D Wilkerson <jwilker@u.washington.edu>  
There are a lot of people working on public commenting in agencies 
in the field of information sciences. you should contact Stu 
Shulman (shulman@pitt.edu) who works with Jamie Callan. But as far 
as I know this is a pretty rich area of research in the e-
government field.
3) Sent by: Russell Winn <ruwinn@nmsu.edu>  
Last summer I worked with public comments about designating 
Wilderness Areas in southern New Mexico. The approach we took was 
to treat each comment (e-mail, letter, etc.) as a separate document 
and then used NVIVO to code and organize the responses(NVIVO is a 
nice program for analyzing qualitative data but there are other 
programs as well). 
Most of the ‘hand coding’ was done by a group of graduate students 
who were enrolled in an Environmental Policy class I was teaching 
at the time. As a class we reviewed some of the documents, met with 
staff from the agency that had collected the comments, and drew up 
a list of potential codes (NVIVO calls them nodes) along with a 
brief description of when that node would be appropriate. I had 
every document separately coded by 2 students. If there was a 
disagreement about the coding the students met and agreed on a 
coding. Even with this reliability check there was some confusion 
about the coding. I ended up recoding many of the documents myself. 
If I were doing this again I would probably do all the coding 
myself, or go through a more lengthy training with the students 
that involved group coding of a number of the documents.
In the end we had too many nodes and the comments were a bit 
difficult to analyze although we did find some interesting 
patterns. Your project sounds more limited looking for needs and 
interests.4) Sent by: Stephen Purpura <stevepurpura@gmail.com>  
I'm a PhD student at Cornell (and graduate of the Kennedy School of
Government) and I pretty much just work on automating content 
analysis of
government data.  I have two papers set for publication at dgo.2008 
(digitalgovernment research) on automating finding issues in 
regulatory rule
comments (I can send the drafts) and another in press with JITP  (see
http://www.stephenpurpura.com/20080116_HillardPurpuraWilkerson-
revised.pdf).My other publications are listed at 
http://www.purpuras.net/publications.html.
Laura B. Nielsen, Ph.D.
Adjunct Professor of Public Policy  
Georgetown Public Policy Institute
3520 Prospect Street, Suite 308F
Washington, DC  20007
WEB http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/lbn4/
Program Analyst
Environmental Analysis Division, MC 2842T
Office of Information Analysis and Access
Office of Environmental Information
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
(202) 566-0621
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Re: [Air-L] Content Analysis Information

NANCY MCDONALD-KNWRTHY

Dominik M. Rosenauer

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