This week’s discourse and content analysis readings emphasized the “objective, systematic and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication” (Frohmann, 1994, p. 19).
For my class activity, I chose to analyze the content found in the Rants & Rave’s board of the Tallahassee Craigslist site. My research question was “What topics are most discussed on the Rants and Rave’s board of the Tallahassee Craigslist site?” There were several open letters to colleagues and bosses; manifestos pertaining to the government, religion and race relations; complaints about bad customer services or lousy restaurant patrons and so forth. I noticed quite a bit of profanity, exclamation points, ALL CAPS, ellipses, and colloquial (slang) terms. The discussion board appears to be a confessional.
My big take-away: before the analysis of documents can take place, there must be lots of pre-thinking. “Every content analysis requires a context within which the available texts are examined. The analyst must, in effect, construct a world in which the texts make sense and can answer the analysts’ research questions” (Kippendorff, 2004, p. 24). So from a disciplinary standpoint, I chose to approach the Rants & Raves board study from the Information Science domain and along the “information grounds” theoretical lines. I wasn’t sure if I did what was asked of me in terms of the class activity. Still, I think the activity was successful in driving home the point that content analysis and discourse analysis are anything but simple “soft” methodologies. On the contrary, without property scaffolding, the work of analysis will be haphazard, which jeopardizes validity and reliability. Empirical research, especially those which involve hypertextual evidence, necessitates clear controls, strict definitions and repeatable procedures.