Exploring a Text for Theoretical Foundation
Introduction
This recipe takes a text and explores its use of theory by using tools such as Word list, Concordance, and Collocation.
Ingredients
- An electronic text to which is rich in theoretical discussion
- A List Words Tool such as Voyant Corpus Term Frequencies
- A Concordance tool such as the Voyant Document KWICs
- A Synonym Finding Tool such as WORDdetail’s Synonyms and Antonyms
Steps
- Prepare Text;
- Log in to TAPoR;
- Generate a word list (sorted by frequency) using the Voyant Corpus Term Frequencies;
- Save the results to the Databench;
- Perform a wildcard search for *ism, and other suffixes suggestive of theory in the frequency list;
- Explore the words found individually using Voyant Document KWICs to understand their Context;
- Repeat this for all found words;
- Use a antonym finding tool such as WORDdetail’s Synonyms and Antonyms to compile a list of words referring to opposing concepts to those previously found;
- Look for contrary theoretical references using Voyant Document KWICs for the antonymical references;
Discussion
This technique involves querying for suffixes that suggest that the subject matter is theoretical in nature. Other suffixes that may prove useful could include: istic, sophy, ism, ist, ize, ise, arian, etc. and Collocation with the word theory itself.
Status
Submitted by sondheim on Sat, 02/26/2011 - 00:00