Affiliation:
1. Kansas State University, USA
Abstract
NVivo 11 Plus, a qualitative data analysis software tool, enables some types of “distant reading” albeit within the text data processing limits of the desktop machine. Some “distant reading” applications include the following: (1) word frequency counts (visualized as word clouds, tree maps, cluster analyses graphs, dendrograms, and ring graphs/circle graphs), (2) text searches (as word trees), (3) theme and sub-theme extractions (as bar charts), (4) matrix queries (as various types of data visualizations), (5) sentiment analyses (as bar charts, hierarchical treemaps, hierarchical sunburst diagrams, and text sets), (6) autocoding by existing pattern, and (7) geolocational mapping. While “distant reading” is still evolving, these unsupervised and semi-supervised machine reading approaches broaden the capabilities of researchers and may serve as a bridge to even more complex distant reading methods.