Applications of Computer-Aided Text Analysis: Analyzing Literary and Nonliterary Texts

Abstract

This chapter describes a methodology for representing mental models as maps, extracting the maps from texts, and analyzing and comparing the maps. The robot study is an analysis of literary texts, whereas the writing study is an analysis of student interviews and written journal entries. Because the goal of this study was to represent the depictions of each robot as accurately as possible, a software program, SKI, was used to make implicit statements explicit. The use of human raters also introduces problems related to inconsistency in the level of analysis as a coder moves from one text to another. Particularly when dealing with a large set of texts, it is possible to have judgments being made in a qualitatively different manner at the beginning and end of coding a set of texts.