Quantitative Narrative Analysis - Paperback

by Roberto Franzosi (Author)

Covering a number of disciplines, including linguistics, literary criticism, computer science, and statistics, this book illustrates author Roberto Franzosi′s distinctive approach to the quantitative analysis of large volumes of narrative texts. The author bases his approach on a rigorous linguistic theory of narrative, rather than the ad-hoc approach typical of content analysis. Focusing on statistical techniques that mirror key narrative features, the book also shows how quantitative narrative analysis (QNA) goes hand-in-hand with another technique of qualitative data analysis: QCA (qualitative comparative analysis).

Author Biography

Roberto Franzosi (PhD at Johns Hopkins, 1981) works at the intersection of sociology, history, linguistics, rhetoric, and computer science. He is working on two major projects: the rise of Italian fascism (1919-1922) and Georgia lynchings (1875-1935). To carry out these projects, based on thousands of newspaper articles, he has developed a computer-assisted approach to text (Quantitative Narrative Analysis, QNA), a software (PC-ACE), and has now moved to fully automated, computational linguistic approaches to text. He has published several books: Tropes and Figures (Routledge, 2017); Quantitative Narrative Analysis (SAGE, 2010); Content Analysis (4 vols; SAGE, 2008); From Words to Numbers: Narrative, Data, and Social Science (CUP, 2004); The Puzzle of Strikes (CUP, 1995). Among recent articles are "Content Analysis" in Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics, edited by Wodak and Forchtner (Routledge, 2017) and "A Third Road to the Past? Historical Scholarship in the Age of Big Data" in Historical Methods (2018).