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January 16, 2007
The project I'm not doing
Geisler, Cheryl. Analyzing Streams of Lanuage: Twelve Steps to the Systematic Coding of Text, Talk, and Other Verbal Data. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004.
This book would be a great text for anyone who was engaged in a coding project (which I am not). When I took M.H.'s 691 methods course a couple years ago, we visited this method (coding) in brief. The whole project of identifying "basic units of language" in a text - the words, "t-units." clauses, etc. seem much more detailed and minute than I am interested in. It's useful to me for clarifying what my project is not, which is why I think LWP recommended it for me. I'm interested in a different level of analysis - something more general, more big picture. But I can see that in rhetorical analysis, the tendency to pick out words and argue for what those words suggest about the text, could easily border on this kind of coding project. Knowing this, I'll be careful to be specific in defining my method.
Now, having said all that, if I ever needed to do this kind of analysis, I would definitely want this text next to me.
Posted by cageyer at January 16, 2007 09:18 PM