Page 271 - DLIS402_INFORMATION_ANALYSIS_AND_REPACKAGING

Information Analysis and Repackaging

Notes Live coding

If your purpose in the content analysis is very clear and simple, an alternative to transcription is
live coding. For this, the coders play back the tape of the radio or TV program or interview, listen
for perhaps a minute at a time, then stop the tape and code the minute they just heard. This works
best when several coders are working together. It is too difficult for beginners at coding, but for
experienced coders it avoids the bother of transcription. Sometimes, content analysis has a subtle
purpose, and a transcript doesn’t give the information you need. That’s when live coding is most
useful: for example, a study of the tone of voice that actors in a drama use when speaking to people
of different ages and sexes.

Analysing secondary data
Sometimes the corpus for a content analysis is produced specifically for the study—or at least, the
transcription is made for that purpose. That’s primary data. But in other instances, the content has
already been transcribed (or even coded) for another purpose. That’s secondary data. Though
secondary data can save you a lot of work, it may not be entirely suitable for your purpose.
This section applies to content that was produced for some other purpose, and is now being analysed.
Content created for different purposes, or different audiences, is likely to have different emphases.
In different circumstances, and in different roles, people are likely to give very different responses.
The expectations produced by a different role, or a different situation, are known as demand
characteristics.
When you find a corpus that might be reusable, you need to ask it some questions, like:
Who produced this, for what audience, in what context?
It’s often misleading to look only at the content itself - the content makes full sense only in its
original context. The context is an unspoken part of the content, but is often more important than
the text of the content.

Why was it produced?

Content that was prepared to support a specific cause is going to be more biased than content that
was prepared for general information.
It’s safe to assume that all content is biased in some way. For example, content that is produced by
or for a trade union is likely to be very different in some ways) from content produced by an employer
group. But in other ways the two sets of content will share many similarities - because they are
likely to discuss the same kinds of issues. Content produced by an advertiser or consumer group,
ostensibly on that same topic, is likely to have a very different emphasis. That emphasis is very
much part of the content - even if this is not stated explicitly.

How old is this corpus?

Is it still valid for your current purpose? It’s tempting to use a corpus that’s already prepared, but it
may no longer be relevant.

Coding content

Coding in content analysis is the same as coding answers in a survey: summarizing responses into
groups, reducing the number of different responses to make comparisons easier. Thus you need to
be able to sort concepts into groups, so that in each group the concepts are both as similar as possible
to each other, and as different as possible from concepts in every other group.

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