School of Communication, Information and Library Studies

Describing and Interpreting the Characteristics

of a Recorded or Visual Message

Methods of Inquiry Syllabus:514

Gustav W. Friedrich

Purpose of Textual Analysis:
What is the nature of communication?
How is communication related to other variables?

Important Considerations in Textual Analysis:
Types of Text
Transcripts of Communication (verbatim recordings of actual
communication)
Outputs of Communication (messages produced by communication; e.g., written artifacts; works of art; footprints)
Both can be: scripted/unscripted; public/private
Acquiring Texts: (a) natural; (b) bring to lab and talk; (c) sample;
(d) literary texts; (e) construct
Approaches to Textual Analysis

Rhetorical Criticism: description, analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of persuasive uses of human communication.

Neo-Aristotelian Criticism: based on the classical rhetorical tradition of the five canons

Genre Criticism: analysis of certain types of text similar in function and form (e.g., apologia, eulogies)

Historical Criticism: describe and evaluate important past events by compiling and analyzing relevant documents:
Oral Histories: examine spoken accounts of past experience
Case Studies: a simple, salient social situation
Biographical Studies: public and private communication of remarkable individuals
History of Ideas:
Institutional Histories:
Social Movements Studies: rhetorical strategies used to rally support for cause

Dramatistic Criticism: Kenneth Burke's pentad--act, purpose, agent,
agency, scene.

Fantasy Theme Analysis: Earnest Bormann's look at embedded narrative dramatizations that shape how people interpret social reality (fantasy themes; fantasy types; rhetorical visions; rhetorical communities)

Content Analysis: making inferences from a systematic and objective description of specified characteristics within a text.

Values: unobtrusive; unstructured; in context; lots of data
Procedures:
Selecting Texts
Determining the unit of analysis--unitizing (physical objects; syntactical units; inferential units; propositional units; thematic units)
Developing content categories (mutually exclusive; equivalent; exhaustive)
Coding units (using Scott's pi for reliability)
Analyzing data

Conversational Analysis: discovering the systematic and orderly properties of dyadic/small group interaction meaningful to conversants.

Functions: Bale's IPA
Structure: adjacency pairs
Effects: orientation/conflict/emergence/reinforcement; content/relational
Conducting CA: obtaining sample; transcribing; categorizing; analyzing; reporting

Unobtrusive Measures: use physical traces or artifacts to describe people's communication behavior.

Archival Research: describing and evaluating comm embedded in existing record of comm behavior.
Analyzing Existing Statistics: e.g., U.S. Census
Meta-Analysis: studying research reports
Bibliometrics: using clustering techniques to study scholarly literature.
Trace Measures: using physical evidence as
measure of erosion: how physical objects are worn down by use natural (book usage) or controlled (ticket number)
measure of accretion: what is added; e.g., garbololgy. natural or controlled.

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