Textual Analysis

  Workshop 1, "Textual Analysis" (coordinators Pascal Marchand and Pierre Ratinaud) is dedicated to discourse analysis methods, especially those required by the large body of data generated by today's media. The workshop regularly organizes training and workshop days.
In addition, members are developing special software, Iramuteq. In addition to traditional textual analysis, this software will offer five new possibilities: tools to assist in interpreting the analyses, the implementation of new methods (application of similarity analyses on the corpus cut into text segments), adaptation to large corpora, perfecting the lemmatization phase, and internationalization (English and German corpora are in a pre-trial phase, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese will be added soon).

Many of these goals have already been achieved (assistance tools, similarity analysis) and the others are under study or in progress. The set of freeware on which this tool is based (especially R) also enables the rapid incorporation of new methodologies for analysis. While these features already make Iramuteq one of the most comprehensive discourse analysis applications - and also make it very easy to use in research and in training (the software runs under Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and is completely free) - a phase of development and expansion of the software is about to begin.