I read an article and was intrigued by their use of discourse analysis + computational methods to track word use associations. Does anyone know suitable primers for computational content analysis? Also, they use QDA Miner-WordStat, but it's only available on PC are there MAC versions available?
I'm hoping to supplement qualitative discourse analysis with content analysis.
Jillian Sunderland I am not sure i understand what you want. If you want computer software that analyses qual data then some include Maxqda, Nvivo, and Atlas, among others.
Valerie Saunders Hi thank you for replying, but I'm looking for computational software (quant) type program that uses machine learning/statistical models as opposed to qualitative coding software.
Are you thinking of machine learning and natural language processing? If so, conduct an academic search for both terms together. There is a learning curve.
Your question is a bit abstract. There are many ways to combine discourse analysis and content analysis.
The first thing that comes to mind is Python. It's the most powerful language for computational content analysis. You can use libraries such as NLTK, spaCy, scikit-learn, and gensim for various NLP and machine learning tasks. There are many tutorials and online courses available to get you started with Python for text analysis.
If you are looking for "user friendly" software, then you could try GATE. It is an open-source software suite for text and language processing. It's compatible with Mac and offers a wide range of text analysis capabilities, including information extraction and sentiment analysis. RapidMiner or KNIME are open-source data analytics platform that supports text mining and analysis. Both are available for Mac. And, of course, there are many commercial solutions, such as IBM SPSS Modeler.
When using these tools, you can apply various machine learning and statistical models for computational content analysis, such as topic modeling, sentiment analysis, word association, and more. The world is your oyster:)