Jules Duchastel

Textual Analysis in Canada: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Qualitative Data

The peculiarity of Canada—a country composed of two major national groups, spatially, linguistically and culturally differentiated—is strongly reflected in its social sciences. Canada contains two entirely distinct academic communities, one solidly bound to the Anglo-American context and the other more attached to French and Continental intellectual traditions. But in some cases, this dual national character can give rise to fertile interactions and exchanges. In the particular field of computerized analysis of qualitative data, we have to deal with both of these realities: on one hand, separate developments have taken place in English-Canadian and French-Canadian universities, following respective trends in sociological theory and methodology; on the other hand, certain “mixed” endeavors at the institutional level as well as reciprocal influences between individual scholars have sometimes furthered an interesting convergence. In this paper, we will present an overview of the use of qualitative software in Canada, stressing above all what we believe are its distinctive features vis-à-vis other countries, but knowing that it is impossible to portray in these few pages an exhaustive picture of the “Canadian situation.” The outline will, inevitably, be partial. In Canada, words have to be defined before being used in public matters, and this also applies to scientific issues. It is not only a question of semantics and translation in a bilingual setting, but rather a question of interpretation: sometimes, even the word “sociology” does not seem to have the same meaning in either part of the country! In this context, when we touch on the subject of Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS), a problem arises from the phrase “qualitative data analysis”: what exactly are we talking about? If we consider that the adjective “qualitative” in the expression “qualitative data” refers to a specific theoretical and methodological approach (i.e., “qualitative analysis”: grounded theory, ethnomethodology, the Chicago school, interactionism, etc.), then CAQDAS is a particular way of using computers to analyze verbal transcripts or written materials. However, if we consider the expression “qualitative data” to be equivalent to “non-numerical data,” in the sense that we emphasize the discursive nature of this data, then CAQDAS should be understood as the

Automated syntactic text description enhancement : the thematic structure of discourse utterances

Our work aims at the optimization of existing tools for computer-assisted description and analysis of textual data. More specifically, we have been involved in the thematic description of clauses and clause complexes of Quebec budget speeches from 1934 to 1960. Our main objective is to enhance the work already done in this direction by elaborating the analytic framework through a study of the thematic structure of these discourses. We first set out the general context of our work by briefly explaining the research project on political discourse under the Duplessis Regime in Quebec (1936–60) and giving a brief survey of the parsing strategy applied to the corpus. Second, we present the theoretical background of thematic analysis and the operational model that we are using here. Finally, we try to illustrate the relevance of such methodological work on research data.Louis-Claude Paquin is a research officer at the Centre for Computer-assisted Textual Analysis (Centre dATO). His work consist of software and methodological development for content analysis and expert systems.Jacques Beauchemin is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Sociology at The Université du Québec à Montreal. His thesis is a comparative study of different forms of political discourse under the Duplessis Regime in Québec.