Studying Complex Discursive Systems..

Abstract

Scholars increasingly theorize about the power of communication to organize and structure social collectives. However, two factors threaten to impede research on these theories: limitations in the scope and range of existing methods for studying complex systems of communication and the large volume of communication produced by even small collectives. Centering resonance analysis (CRA) is a new text analysis method that has broad scope and range and can be applied to large quantities of written text and transcribed conversation. It identifies discursively important words and represents these as a network, then uses structural properties of the network to index word importance. CRA networks can be directly visualized and can be scored for resonance with other networks to support a number of spatial analysis methods. Following a critique of existing methodologies, this paper describes the theoretical basis and operational details of CRA, describes its advantages relative to other techniques, demonstrates its face validity and representational validity, and demonstrates its utility in modeling organizational knowledge. The conclusion argues for its applicability in several organizational research contexts before describing its potential for use in a broader range of applications, including media content analysis, conversation analysis, computer simulations, and models of communication systems.1986; Schiffrin, 1994) makes conversation and interaction analysis less common than perhaps it should be in the communication discipline. Moving to the small group level, the detailed study of interaction is more difficult and rare still, and at the multigroup (i.e. organizational or cultural) level it is virtually unheard of. As our emerging theories and models of communication grow in scope to embrace complex collective phenomena, we risk making them unworkable as guides for empirical research. Put simply, we worry that the existing body of communication research methods is incapable of handling the complexity being theorized in the discipline.In this article, we propose a general analytical framework called centering resonance analysis (CRA), a flexible means of representing the content of large sets of messages, and assisting in their analysis. We present CRA as a text analysis method, suited to studying formalized communication like reports, letters, memos, emails, and other written texts. However, as we illustrate below, CRA is also applicable to transcribed conversations. Developments in voice recognition technology promise the ability in the near future to "textualize" live conversation, making it amenable to CRA methods as well. In establishing the need for CRA, we ground our arguments in the concerns of organizational communication because this is where the need to study large volumes of communication is especially acute. However, this does not mean CRA is only useful in research on formal organizations. As we explain in the conclusion, CRA has many applications in the broader discipline to problems in rhetoric, mass c...

Analyzing Social Media And Learning Through Content And Social Network Analysis: A Faceted Methodological Approach

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A Network Text Analysis of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

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