Q. Are there resources to assist with content analysis, source mining or text mining?

Answered By: Kathryn Ray
Last Updated: May 03, 2024     Views: 807

The exact definition of "content analysis" varies by discipline. Universally it includes the reading/viewing of "content", be it text, images, or video, and categorizing content with labels, called "codes". This analysis can include both qualitative methods analyzing the meanings of content or quantitative methods analyzing statistical patterns in the content.

You should select appropriate tools depending on the intent of the research, methods, and corpus makeup or size. Consider the following resources:
 
  • ProQuest TDM Studio is a subscription database-web-based tool that allows users analyze large amounts of content while collaborating with colleagues in real-time on one cloud-based platform. Using content retrieved from ProQuest databases that AU Library subscribes to, including current and historical newspapers, scholarly and trade journals, magazines and theses and dissertations, you can conduct data analysis, text mining, and data visualization to uncover relationships, patterns, and connections.
  • NVivo is the most popular qualitative research software. At AU it is supported by the Center for Teaching, Research & Learning (CTRL). NVivo can handle a wide array of file formats, including text, audio, images, and video. Like many of its competitors, it requires a paid license, but you can get access as an AU student, staff, or faculty member. Please see: Where can I download NVivo and get help using it?
    • Competitors include MAXQDA, QDA Miner, and Quirkos. All require a paid subscription. AU does not provide licenses.
  • Taguette is a free and open source software for qualitative coding in text sources. It runs in your browser or can be run locally. It's lightweight and easy, but it has less features than NVivo and supports less filetypes.
  • Voyant is browser-based open source environment for text reading and analysis. It can perform quantitative tasks like word frequency counts and additionally visualize many different types of relationships within the text corpus.
    • There are several similar open source text analysis tools, like Libro, AntConc, and KHCoder, but Voyant is browser-based and simple to use.
  • oTranscribe is a free and open source audio transcription platform to that helps you type transcriptions of audio and video files while they play, all in your browser or in the app if you choose to download it.
  • Tropy is a free and open source image description desktop app. It allows you to organize, describe, and add metadata to images. It was designed to be used with scanned images from archival document collections, but can be used for other types of images.

Social media research tools:

Many students are interested in doing content analysis (or text mining) research of social media content. The lines between different types of content analysis, text analysis, and text mining can easily become blurred when working with big data from social media. Please see the Social Media Research subject guide for more information, including about TOS and API limitations that make working with certain platforms (Instagram, X, TikTok) more challenging.
 
Social Media Archive @ ICPSR (SOMAR) is a centralized repository for social media research data. SOMAR contains a wide range of data collected from large-scale social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit, as well as smaller, more specialized data sets focused on specific research topics. These data sets have been collected and curated by researchers from around the world, and they cover various topics such as political communication, online behavior, and social networks. The data in our archive takes two forms. They can be public, i.e., available for immediate download, and/or restricted, i.e., available within our secure data enclave after receiving approval following a submitted restricted data application.
 
The following social media research tools should be usable for content analysis without any programming knowledge:
Data collection software:
  • NVivo has its own web dataset collection tool, NCapture, which only works for NVivo. It can capture Tweets, YouTube videos, and some Facebook pages.
  • Voxgov This link opens in a new windowPaid subscription database updated in real-time, Voxgov provides access to social media feeds, press releases, publications, and documents from all branches of the federal government. Content from individual representatives and agencies officials is also included.
  • Netlytic is a free browser-based social media research tool that also has some text mining features. It should provide term frequency and other quantitative content analysis needs. Notably, it supports the whole process from collection to analysis, so it's an all-in-one package - in your browser! It works with X-Twitter, YouTube comments, and Reddit posts, as well as other types of data that can be manually loaded in. See Netlytic's intro video for instructions.
  • Chorus requires some setup and has a learning curve, but it was created specific for doing Twitter analysis in social science research and is a pretty comprehensive search and analysis tool. Much like Netlytic, it can support the research process from dataset collection through analysis and visualization.
  • Tweet Archiver and its cousin TAGS are fairly straightforward ways to get Tweets into Google Sheets to be loaded into whatever qualitative or quantitative analysis software you desire.

Related FAQs:

Related Subject Guides:

If you would like further assistance, please Ask-A-Librarian.

 

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