The world of electronic text analysis is a lot more confusing and complex than I could have ever imagined. To be completely honest I don’t understand it at all from the first three chapters of Introducing Electronic Text Analysis by Svenja Adolphs. There was a lot of information regarding a corpus so I went to the glossary in the back of the book to help me understand corpora and this is what I found:
A collection of linguistic data, such as written texts or transcribed speech, that has been designed to be representative of a particular language domain or variety, with its size and content having been carefully taken into account. This careful design and consideration of representativeness differentiates corpora from other electronic text resources, such as TEXT ARCHIVES. Most contemporary corpora exist in a machine readable form so that patterns of occurrence of lexical and grammatical items can be derived through computer-aided analysis.
Upon reading this it became slightly easier for me to understand the reading. Amongst corpora, in this chapter Adolphs also discussed data representation and storage and gave an outline of contemporary electronic text resources.
In the next chapter, Adolphs presented some basic techniques in electronic data analysis. Those techniques include
- The calculation of basic information about a text or a collection of texts
- Word lists
- Keywords and key sequences
These techniques “inform the research process” by generating hypotheses, testing hypotheses and facilitating manual processes. The thing that I appreciated the most from the three chapters we read were the keywords. I thought it was interesting to see a list of words that are frequently used and to see how many times they are used. The health professional corpus had “the” at the top of their list appearing 156,229 times. Its obviously impossible but I think it would be interesting if somebody monitored my speaking and told me what words I used most frequently and how many times I used them.
Keyword searches are very useful in my life. Its an amazing shortcut that aids everybody in so many ways. The search bar on my iphone is my greatest friend and in some ways it is similar to the keywords that Adolphs discusses, just not as complex as that. The search bar on my phone allows me to type in anything and it will search my entire phone for that word and if it isn’t found then it has the ability to take me to the internet to find it there. My iphone is my own version of a corpus and my search bar is my personal text analysis.