Software may help, but I do not believe that it is mandatory.

Here is the method I use (with a reference):

Method Critical Text Theme Analysis

as Michael W. Marek wrote, it is not necessary. It can be helpful or even necessarily, however, if you have specific hypotheses that need to be tested.

It is not necessary, but carrying out keyword or collocation analyses can be of much help if you wish to work on the intersubjective basis.

The most important thing is having a system of organizing your analysis. Software may help you do that, but the software is not magic. It is the ideas and analysis you put into it that result in the analysis outcomes you want.

Michael W. Marek @Michal Místecký @Rhianon Allen Thanks a lot. These suggestions are very helpful.

Short answer: no.

Longer answer - if you want to use a corpus-assisted approach, you would need to make use of a concordancer - say Lancsbox or WordSmith (the latter is paid-for but a free earlier version is available Like WordSmith Tools Version 5 - check this https://lexically.net/wordsmith/downloads/). Otherwise, you can make use of models that rely on a close reading of the material at hand. For example: https://www.shs-conferences.org/articles/shsconf/pdf/2018/14/shsconf_ichss2018_02003.pdf

or

Article Constructing state, territory, and sovereignty in the Syrian conflict

Software is useful for large data sets. If your data is limited, manual analysis will help you discover more things.

Hello,

I would advise you to use corpus linguistic analysis.

You can create your own corpus in a text file and download Lancsbox (Lancaster university). With respect to the analysis, you can use the keyword technique to explore the major themes (topoi) in your corpora.

For example, you need to compile a corpus of texts from different sources (corpus of the daily mail on Syrian conflic + corpus of CNN on Syrian conflict) and so on.

The keyword technique will allow you to extract the major themes from each corpus you analyse via Lancsbox.

I hope this answered your query.

Best regards,