ABSTRACT
This chapter starts with an examination of the data matrices that each type of text analysis affords and builds to a delineation of the universe of substantive questions that can be addressed via the approaches to the analysis of texts and transcripts. Relational alternatives to thematic text analysis can be grossly classified either as semantic text analyses, which map relations among concepts, or network text analyses, which map relations among statements. Network text analysis originated with the observation that once one has a series of encoded statements, one can proceed to combine these statements into a network. Network text analysts have developed many other measures of network characteristics. One example from this book is a theme’s conductivity, which refers to the number of linkages that the theme provides between other pairs of themes. The associated warning is that if one’s substantive question is about semantic relations, themes should not be counted but should be encoded according to a semantic grammar.
