Textual Analysis Primer/Examples?
June 20, 2008 9:12 PM Subscribe
Looking for a general background/framework within which to define the more technical aspects of a textual analysis project, as well as interesting examples of computer-driven textual analysis.
I am participating in a research project on textual analysis of historical architectural magazine articles.
We'll be inputting the titles and maybe text of articles from architectural magazines from 1930 to 1960 into a database and looking for patterns.
I am wholly ignorant of textual- or content-analysis, and am sure there's a great deal of literature and interesting analyses that other smarter people have already thought of.
I'm naively thinking word frequency, adjacency and correlation (i.e.: what percentage of articles that mention 'le corbusier' also mention 'modernism' in as given year/magazine), to figure out links between articles. etc. This could spin of into graph-theory measurements.
Our interest is in the actual content, keywords, etc., not so much in sentence structure, grammar, parsers, etc.
I program in Python, mostly, and am in charge of the 'hard' numerical part of the project (there's 3 architectural history geeks in charge of the soft conceptual part).
Books are nice, but something online might be quicker.
As we are architects, interesting visualizations are always welcome.
I am participating in a research project on textual analysis of historical architectural magazine articles.
We'll be inputting the titles and maybe text of articles from architectural magazines from 1930 to 1960 into a database and looking for patterns.
I am wholly ignorant of textual- or content-analysis, and am sure there's a great deal of literature and interesting analyses that other smarter people have already thought of.
I'm naively thinking word frequency, adjacency and correlation (i.e.: what percentage of articles that mention 'le corbusier' also mention 'modernism' in as given year/magazine), to figure out links between articles. etc. This could spin of into graph-theory measurements.
Our interest is in the actual content, keywords, etc., not so much in sentence structure, grammar, parsers, etc.
I program in Python, mostly, and am in charge of the 'hard' numerical part of the project (there's 3 architectural history geeks in charge of the soft conceptual part).
Books are nice, but something online might be quicker.
As we are architects, interesting visualizations are always welcome.
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http://people.ucsc.edu/~wsack/ (WARNING: evil window resizing)
http://hybrid.ucsc.edu/SocialComputingLab/projects.htm (no window resizing)
posted by shortfuse at 6:23 AM on June 21, 2008