INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO THE CONCEPT AND PRACTICE OF WRITTEN TEXT DOCUMENTARY CONTENT ANALYSIS (WTDCA)
| Date | 01 February 1994 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026927 |
| Published date | 01 February 1994 |
| Pages | 111-133 |
| Author | MARÍA PINTO MOLINA |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO THE CONCEPT AND
PRACTICE OF WRITTEN TEXT DOCUMENTARY CONTENT
ANALYSIS
(WTDCA)
MARÍA PINTO MOLINA
Department of Documentation
Universidad
de
Granada,
18071 Granada, Spain
Content analysis, restricted within the limits of written textual doc-
uments (WTDCA), is a field which is greatly in need of extensive
interdisciplinary research. This would clarify certain concepts, esp-
ecially those concerned with 'text', as a new central nucleus of
semiotic research, and 'content', or the informative power of text.
The objective reality (syntax) of the written document should be, in
the cognitive process that all content analysis entails, interpreted
(semantically and pragmatically) in an intersubjective manner with
regard to the context, the analyst's knowledge base and the doc¬
umentary objectives. The contributions of semiolinguistics (textual),
logic (formal) and psychology (cognitive) are fundamental to the
conduct of these activities. The criteria used to validate the results
obtained complete the necessary conceptual reference panorama.
INTRODUCTION
THE WELL-KNOWN PHENOMENON of documentary 'inundation' has be-
come the main cause for the growing presence of centres dealing with document
processing. The basic objective of such establishments is the transformation of
the original, or primary, documents into a more manageable format which in
turn accurately represent the original. As stated by Lancaster
[1,
p. 1], the main
purpose of indexing and abstracting is to construct representations of published
items in a form suitable for inclusion in some type of database. One advantage
of these derived, or secondary, documents, compared with the originals from
which they are taken, is their greater ease of handling in databases. It should
be pointed out that the study and analysis of the formal aspects of the original
document imply a first and necessary step in the elaboration of these derived
documents, but their content is the real 'hobbyhorse', not only because of
greater difficulty entailed in its analysis and description, but also due to the
documentary importance of the products derived from this analytical-synthetic
process. And the fact is that the more documents there are in a specific centre,
the greater the need to analyse their 'content' rather than simply recording their
formal properties.
Journal
of
Documentation,
vol. 50, no. 2, June 1994, pp. 111-133
111
JOURNAL OF DOCUMENTATION vol. 50, no. 2
Close to the terms 'knowledge', 'information' and 'meaning', the word
content expresses their superposition and integration into a higher unit of
significance. Content is at the same time knowledge, information and meaning.
According to Hirsch [2, p. 8], meaning is that which is represented by a text; it
is what the author meant by his use of a particular sign sequence; it is what the
signs represent. Significance, on the other hand, names a relationship between
that meaning and a person, or a conception, or a situation. The content we are
looking for (documentary content, we must not forget this qualifier) is nearest
to that 'significance'. We are concerned with mental reality that relies on the
knower. As Watson states [3, p. 277], the conception of meaning as indepen-
dent of the knower, which assumed that is was a property of objects or events
was a result of the transfer to the social sciences of a viewpoint which dom-
inated the physical sciences. Recent writers in the sociology of knowledge see
the subjective and objective dimensions of experience as simply different ways
of viewing the same world and both are essential for an understanding of any
situation. On the other hand, as we will see, from the text's properties we can
infer that textual content is many-sided and unlimited. In order to satisfy our
analytical aims, it has to be specified and limited. Written text documentary
content analysis (wtdca) forces us to determine what part of this many-sided
and unlimited content will satisfy some documentary needs. And so the
'content' may adopt different forms, from 'subject' and 'index' to 'abstract'.
The 'classification' is a consequence or effect. Nevertheless, our main concern
rests on the abstracting operations and their corresponding produce, the
abstracts.
The term 'content analysis' denotes a family of research methods that
attempts to identify and record the meaning of documents and other forms of
communication systematically [4, p. 251]. Being already restricted to the doc-
umentary field, and more concretely to the field of written text or bibliographic
documents, written text documentary content analysis (WTDCA) consists, on the
whole, of the examination or breakdown that the written textual object must
undergo in order to determine its content, and its subsequent description. What
we really aim to obtain, beginning with 'exploratory', or first hand,
information, is the corresponding explanatory, or 'representative' information
(second hand). We are confronted by a severe problem from the outset with
this type of
analysis,
which is none other than the vagueness and ambiguity that
prevail as far as the term content is concerned, this being a problem that goes
beyond linguistic borders. In Spanish, it is extremely difficult to establish a
clear definition of the terms 'contenido' and 'materia'; a similar thing occurs in
English when we refer to the words 'content', 'aboutness' and 'subject'. The
fact is that, as Krippendorff [5, p. 10] maintains in a much wider sense than
that which is purely documentary although it is applicable to our current
interests, 'content analysis transcends conventional notions of content as an
object of concern and is intricately linked to more recent conceptions of
symbolic phenomena. This may be seen in the context of a changed awareness
about human communication, the existence of new media, and the roles they
play in the transmission of information in society'. In this paper we shall try to
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