Text Analysis

Abstract

Even once words have been counted, or their themes and semantics quantitatively rendered as networks or grammars, it remains unclear what they reveal. Are the texts windows into historical facts that the analyst cannot experience in person, or are they windows into their authors' perspectives? A choice is needed here, because authors' perspectives may alter their renderings of “the facts” and, conversely, changes in an author's surroundings may prompt changes in her or his perspective. Next, is the researcher a novice who strives for fidelity to authors' perspectives, or is the researcher an expert whose perspective affords insights unknown to the authors? With contemporary growth in both world population and communication technologies, increasing contacts among peoples with disparate perspectives afford the social sciences an opportunity both to improve our understanding of these perspectives (or cultures) and to discontinue mining words for evidence consistent with theoretical perspectives of our own choosing. Modality analysis is a promising method for performing historical‐comparative analyses of political cultures based on the volumes of texts only recently available to us.