Textual Analysis in Four Situational Contexts
Sunday, June 21, 2009 at 3:21PM Digital document tools are yet to provide affordance for the complexity of behaviour required by those who use existing text for the purpose of generating, developing and constructing new meanings. Watch an academic at work sometime: you'll see her kicking back and reading text only sometimes. At other times, she is busily underlining text with flourishing connectors flowing across paragraphs, scribbling tiny notes in the margins, comparing the use of a key term with three other authors---each of whose works are propped open across the busy desk for ready reference---making notes in a journal and on manuscript drafts currently in preparation. Knowledge work is simultaneously fluid, collagic, comparative, analytical and creative.
Yet digital document tools to date have typically conceived of the user as either a document creator or as a document consumer. Users of Microsoft Word, Emacs, VI, Eclipse and Smalltalk are all expected to create text. Users of web browsers, Amazon's Kindle, Stanza and various hypertext fiction products are allowed reading functionality. Sure, Kindle lets you take notes, and Microsoft Word has commenting functionality; but these are stingy affordances for such complex behaviour.
What has been missing is the concept of developing text as a function of actively working with extant text.
There are three major usage scenarios for textual analysis that occur frequently within knowledge work; and the possibility of one one more usage scenario emerging. Let us examine each scenario in turn.
Analysis of high status texts. Law, literarcy criticism, philosophy and religious studies all depend on detailed examination of high status texts. The knowledge worker wants far more than a cursory examination of the texts; the knowledge worker wants to drill the text for meaning, examine the development of themes, immerse himself in the poetic structure or contrast the current case against historical rulings.
The need: The high status text is exhaustively analysed to reveal linguistic, conceptual or structural elements for reworking into new expression, concepts or forms.
Comparative textual criticism. History, archeology and religious studies all rely on the comparison of multiple texts. Comparing multiple manuscripts, of a manuscript with a parallel digital textual representation, or comparing multiple images.
The need: The comparative texts have similarities correlated and differences identified as a preparation for further analytical processes.
Analysis of corpora. Corpus studies have grown from the academic niche of linguistics into a form of knowledge work present in many if not most environments. Linguistics, knowledge management (suggestion boxes, cafe-style discussion circles), complexity management (weak signal detection) and public relations (social media analysis) and sociology all seek to leverage meaning inherent in corpora.
The need: The study of a corpus calls, not for in-depth study of expression or structure, but the recognition of patterns across the data items.
Document review. (Leaving aside the average blog post or comment, and ignoring transcription of oral delivery:) Written text is edited text. Of each of these three scenarios, it is this scenario that has been attempted most frequently by digital tool vendors. Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat does allow commenting features. Various tool vendors have attempted to implement end-to-end document review workflows. Yet they severely under-used in corporate environments, for they are clunkier and slower for reviewers and authors alike.
The need: The reviewer seeks to understand the document only in sufficient detail to provide corrections, suggest alterations and pose questions to the author.
In each of the scenarios, the assumption has been that the text under review is a traditional, sequential, linear document. The postulated scenario is this: What would each of these scenarios be if the underlying text were written as a hypertext? What difference in thought patterns or tool support would be required?
The Textual Analysis in Tinderbox research project seeks to examine task and tool requirements for each of these scenarios of use to inform the design of digital tools to better support those who need co-generate meaning with existing texts.
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This book is part of the Oxford series of introductions to language studies, edited by H.G. Widdowson himself. More specifically, it is an introduction to discourse analysis. Here, discourse mainly refers to how language is used by people to make meaning and communicate, leaving out socio-cultural constraints. As the author pinpoints in the preface, the main purpose is to provide a useful and above all an accessible tool for an audience, academic or otherwise, approaching this subdiscipline of linguistics for the first time. Therefore, this book, like the whole series itself, aims at "preparing the conceptual ground" (p. xi), in order to support more academically oriented technical texts.
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