Computer-aided textual analysis

Workshop veranstaltet von Cathleen Kantner und Amelie Kutter an der Freien Universität Berlin, 27.-28. May, 2010, in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Verbundprojekt RECON und dem Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence (JMCE) an der Freien Universität Berlin.

Abstract: In  the  digital  era,  large  bodies  of  electronic data  hold  great  promise  for  the  exploration  of  researchers’  questions.  Social scientists  have  started  to  use computer-aided  and  linguistic methods for the investigation of social and political issues, drawing on large text corpora. In the  process,  they  have  invariably  been  confronted with a host of problems related to the compilation  of  an  issue-specific  corpus; the  retrieval  of  content-related  information  and  its frequency-based   generalisation;   the   down-sizing   of   corpora;   the   detailed   qualitative-linguistic analysis of smaller sub-corpora; and the triangulation of text analytical methods for the  qualitative  and  quantitative exploration  of  texts.  At  the  same  time,  computational  and corpus  linguists  have  developed  and  applied new  tools  for  the  computational retrieval, annotation, and representation of linguistic information in large text corpora. However, they are  faced  with  the  challenge  of communicating these  innovations  to  a  broader  scientific audience  that  has  an  increasing interest  in  these  tools  of  analysis,  but  often  operates  with  different (contentrelated) categories. The  objective  of  this  workshop  is  to  explore  the  common  methodological  interests  of computational  and corpus  linguists  working  on  computer-aided  linguistic  analysis,  on  the  one hand, and social scientists, who have used computational and corpus-linguistic tools to advance text analysis in the social sciences, on the other. We hope to foster interdisciplinary cooperation focusing on method-related issues.