Events diary
Thematic Analysis Via Corpus Linguistics and Beyond
You have thousands of words of data. You try a traditional thematic analysis of your text. Soon, colour coding, close reading, writing ad hoc reflections about the text becomes too onerous a task. You doubt the validity of your observations. You wish there was another way to streamline the process, that would extract key themes in data in a faster and empirically-valid way.
Join us for a session in which we showcase empirical methods for the extraction and analysis of meaning, concepts, and themes in texts. The session provides an introduction to corpus linguistics (via Sketchengine.eu) and to a new generation tool for meaning analyisis called Concept Cruncher (developed by the Concept Analytics Lab). Concept Cruncher is an online tool for analysing the conceptual content of large texts. It reads and measures the significance of concepts/ideas in one text in relation to another one/baseline. The visual output is in the form of a starburst diagram.
In this session, we will use texts from the Mass Observation Archive to showcase approaches to thematic analysis.
The workshop is open to Sussex researchers at all levels - please register using your @sussex.ac.uk email address. Refreshments will be provided.
This workshop is part of The Digital Methods Accelerator (DMA) Summer Camp 2025, a series of in-person taster workshops 30 June-3 July aimed at Social Sciences and Humanities researchers at all levels wanting to explore and skill up on digital methods for their research. The DMA Summer Camp will cover the whole research data lifecycle with sessions planned on each stage of the cycle.