Page 265 - DLIS402_INFORMATION_ANALYSIS_AND_REPACKAGING

Information Analysis and Repackaging

Notes
writing process? Although these questions seem totally unrelated, they do share a commonality: in
the Palmquist, Carley and Dale study, their answers rely on computer-aided text analysis to
demonstrate how different texts can be analyzed.

Literary texts

One half of the study explored the depiction of robots in 27 science fiction texts written between
1818 and 1988. After texts were divided into three historically defined groups, readers look for how
the depiction of robots has changed over time. To do this, researchers had to create concept lists and
relationship types, create maps using a computer software (see Fig. 12.1), modify those maps and
then ultimately analyze them. The final product of the analysis revealed that over time authors
were less likely to depict robots as metallic humanoids.

Figure 12.1: A map representing relationships among concepts.

Hear (100)
Very Positive (58)
Reason (100)
Positive (25)
Talk (83)
Neutral (8)
Think (100)
Negative (8)
Very negative (0) Walk (58)
Non-metallic
Humanoid (8) Is evaluated Does action
Metallic by Author
Humanoid (67)
Metallic Fear (58)
non-humanoid (25) Friend (58)
Is of
Robot Has characteristic Loyality (50)
this type
Brain (100) attributed by Pride (50)
character
Circuits (83)
Trust (58)
Consciousness (83) Has
Emotion
Eyes (75) Feature Has
Face (83)
Hear (100)
Intelligence (100)
Memory (100)
Fear (58)
Senses (100)
Sight (75) Friendship (58)
Voice (83) Loyality (50)
Pride (50)
Trust (58)
Non-literary texts
The second half of the study used student journals and interviews, teacher interviews, texts books,
and classroom observations as the non-literary texts from which concepts and words were taken.
The purpose behind the study was to determine if, in fact, over time teacher and students would
begin to share a similar vocabulary about the writing process. Again, researchers used computer
software to assist in the process. This time, computers helped researchers generated a concept list
based on frequently occurring words and phrases from all texts. Maps were also created and analyzed
in this study (see Fig. 12.2).

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