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Textual analysis

Marcus A. Doel(author)

Chapter of: The Field Guide to Mixing Social and Biophysical Methods in Environmental Research(pp. 585–592)

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Title	Textual analysis
Contributor	Marcus A. Doel(author)
DOI	https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0418.44
Landing page	https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0418/chapters/10.11647/obp.0418.44
License	https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Copyright	Marcus A. Doel;
Publisher	Open Book Publishers
Published on	2025-02-25
Long abstract	Textual analysis comes in many forms, and is at work whenever anyone tries to make sense of the world. Accordingly, the chapter introduces an expansive understanding of texts, the vast majority of which are not authored by humans (such as the climate history archived in ice cores and lake sediments), and also an expansive understanding of textual analysis (from the literary to the palaeoenvironmental), which is nevertheless at risk of becoming dominated by the computational analysis of machine-readable texts (since everything can be digested by the binary code). The chapter also emphasises the embedment of texts within innumerable and illimitable contexts, and the ethical challenge of doing justice to that (con)textual embedment.
Page range	pp. 585–592
Print length	8 pages
Language	English (Original)

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Contributors

Marcus A. Doel

(author)

Professor of Human Geography at Swansea University

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8892-2709

References

For a discussion of textual analysis in geography, and more widely, see:
Black, E. 2001. IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (Little, Brown).
Doel, M.A. 2023. ‘Textual analysis’, in Key Methods in Geography, ed. by N. Clifford, M. Cope, and T. Gillespie (Sage Publications), pp. 245–261.
McKee, A. 2003. Textual Analysis: A Beginner’s Guide (Sage Publications).
For open-access books that give a flavour of different forms of textual analysis, see:
Helgesson, S., H. Bodin, and A. Mörte Alling. 2022. Literature and the Making of the World: Cosmopolitan Texts, Vernacular Practices (Bloomsbury). https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501374180
Jones, R.H., A. Chik, and C.A. Hafner. 2015. Discourse and Digital Practices: Doing Discourse Analysis in the Digital Age (Routledge). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315726465
McEnery, A. and H. Baker. 2017. Corpus Linguistics and 17th-Century Prostitution: Computational Linguistics and History (Bloomsbury). https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474295062
Schwandt, S. 2021. Digital Methods in the Humanities: Challenges, Ideas, Perspectives (Bielefeld University Press). https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2f9xskk
Tonkin, E.L. and G.J.L. Tourte. 2016. Working with Text: Tools, Techniques and Approaches for Text Mining (Chandos Elsevier).
Cope, M., Chapter 22, this volume. ‘Archival methods.’
Davis, D.K., Chapter 29, this volume. ‘Historical ecology.’
Derrida, J. 1992. ‘Ulysses gramophone: hear say yes in Joyce’, in Acts of Literature (Routledge), pp. 253–309.
Doel, M.A. 2023. ‘Textual analysis’, pp. 245–261 in Key Methods in Geography, ed. by N. Clifford, M. Cope, and T. Gillespie (Sage Publications).
Fleischman, R.K., W. Funnell, and S.P. Walker. 2013. Critical Histories of Accounting: Sinister Inscriptions in the Modern Era (Routledge). https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203102749
Johnston, L. and Longhurst, R., Chapter 32, this volume. ‘Interviews: structured, semi-structured and open-ended.’
King, G.E. and Abbott, P.M., Chapter 28, this volume. ‘Geochronological methods.’
Longhurst, R. and Johnston, L., Chapter 27, this volume. ‘Focus groups.’
Posada, J., G. Newlands, and M. Miceli. 2023. ‘Labor, automation, and human–machine communication’, in The Sage Handbook of Human–Machine Communication, ed. by A.L. Guzman, R. McEwen, and S. Jones (Sage Publications), pp. 384–391. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529782783
Sayre, N.F., Chapter 34, this volume. ‘Participant observation and ethnography.’
Sutherland, K. 2011. ‘Marx in jargon’, in Stupefaction: A Radical Anatomy of Phantoms (Seagull), pp. 26–90.
Weizman, E. 2017. Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (Zone). https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv14gphth

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Textual analysis comes in many forms, and is at work whenever anyone tries to make sense of the world. Accordingly, the chapter introduces an expansive understanding of texts, the vast majority of which are not authored by humans (such as the climate history archived in ice cores and lake sediments), and also an expansive understanding of textual analysis (from the literary to the palaeoenvironmental), which is nevertheless at risk of becoming dominated by the computational analysis of machine-readable texts (since everything can be digested by the binary code). The chapter also emphasises the embedment of texts within innumerable and illimitable contexts, and the ethical challenge of doing justice to that (con)textual embedment.