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Sandra Murphy. “At Last: Culture and Consequences: The Canaries in the Coal Mine.” Research in the Teaching of English 42.2 (2007): 228-244.
Sullivan, Francis J. “Dysfunctional Workers, Functional Texts: The Transformation of Work in Institutional Procedure Manuals.” Written Communication 14.3 (1997): 313-359.
Every word has a meaning agreed upon by a group of people. That group may be most of the speakers of a particular language, but more likely it is some specific subset of people within that group. If the word has traveled through academia, chances are it has multiple meanings trying to occupy the same disciplinary space at the same time. Chances are also good that there is an argument going on somewhere about which definition is right, valid, useful, or true. Consequently, the first step to discussing any important concept in any scholarly publication is to define it.
This blog is my attempt at corralling the various definitions I find for the words I use in my academic life. It is not, and will never be, comprehensive. It’s more of an experiment in public note-taking.
“A text does not fully or unambiguously display its history—even the most insightful of interpretations and analyses are only likely to recover some elements of its fuller history, to notice some textual features that allow for uncertain guesses about their origins…All writing draws on writers’ knowledge, beliefs, and practices, built up through experiences of socially and historically situated life events. Writers themselves are only very partially aware of the many debts they owe to these intertextual and intercontextual influences,” (171).
“When people talk about “text,” there are several different senses that we should be aware of to avoid confusion. Text sometimes means a unique material Inscription…Text is sometimes taken more expansively, to refer as well to the various mental and oral representations of the material texts, regardless of whether they are ever written out… Sometimes, all of these material inscriptions (and perhaps the ideational representations) are idealized in retrospect as “the text,” uniting all moments in the production under a unified label…How we understand text—as a unique material object, as a representation regardless
of medium (including thought and speech), as the ideal that unifies varied acts and objects in a process—is not the issue; the issue is being aware of the different senses, not shifting from one to the other unconsciously,” (169).
“Content analysis is the identifying, quantifying, and analyzing of specific words, phrases, concepts, or other observable semantic data in a text or body of texts with the aim of uncovering some underlying thematic or rhetorical pattern running through these texts…content analysis’s emphasis on semantic or meaning-based patterns distinguishes it from more purely formal stylistic approaches such as register analysis (Biber & Finegan, 1994) or textlinguistic stylistics (Sandig, 1986). Content analysis makes no claim to being a rich, definitive, or comprehensive method of analysis, as some critics have alleged. Given Its limited scope, it cannot be so. Rather, content analysis typically serves only to provide empirical grounding for other more sophisticated methods, such as those detailed in other chapters of this book,” (14).
