This four-volume Major Work mines the extensive research of the past few decades into textual analysis. The set's esteemed team of editorshave collated seminal papers which consider the key difference between content analysis and textual analysis, the conceptual starting point and the logic and the attitude of the research process, as well as exploring the tension between reading a text and using a text, amongst other key issues.
With experienced and respected figures in the field at the helm, the carefully selected papers in this collection are put into context and analysed in a newly-written introductory chapter which charts the developments and looks to the future of the field.
Volume One: Basic philosophical considerations
Volume Two: Modalities of textual work
Volume Three: Reading Text
Volume Four: Using Text
Martin W Bauer is Professor of Social Psychology and Research Methodology at the LSE. He has been conducting content analysis of mainly press materials for the purposes of longitudinal monitoring of public awareness and controversies over new technologies such as nuclear power, GM crops and foods, cloning and stem cells research etc. He thinks of 'texts' as one of three important data streams of the social sciences which is reflected in the conception of the textbook 'Qualitative Researching with Text, Image and Sound' (Bauer & Gaskell, eds, SAGE, 2000 with translations into Brazilian Portuguese, 2002, and Chinese, complex, 2008, and simple characters and Hebrew, in preparation). He retains a keen interest in media monitoring with computer-assisted methodologies for the purposes of gauging public opinion and cultural changes in relation to Science & Society issues.
Ahmet Süerdem is Professor of Consumer and Organisation Studies and Research Methodology at Istanbul Bilgi University and currently Senior Visiting Fellow at the LSE's Methodology Institute. He has been conducting research on culture, ideology and cognition and operationalisation of these concepts. He has various publications offering new perspectives for bridging the qualitative-quantitative gap and detecting discursive communities through systematic text analysis. He is currently working on "semiotic networks" as an innovative method for detecting the structure of social representations and cultural patterns through text analysis.
Dr Aude Bicquelet is a LSE fellow in the department of Methodology. She holds a Master degree and a PhD in Government from the University of Essex. In 2009 she was awarded an ESRC Postdoctoral fellowship to further her work on Computer-based Methods in the department of Methology. She is part of the department of Methodology group on Text Analysis and one of the organizers of the annual LSE Conference on Text-Mining. She has worked as a consultant on various occasions (i.e. for the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) and teaches several courses on Textual Methods at the LSE and at the ECPR Summer and Winter schools in Methods and Techniques.
***awaiting editor approval
