Evans, James and Pedro Aceves. 2016. “Machine Translation: Mining Text for Social Theory”. Annual Review of Sociology 42:21-50. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-soc-081715-074206
I am curious to know more about the limitations of the methodology discussed in the reading. My first thought is that content analysis allows access to a particular cognitive space in which information is communicated between individuals but there is much of social life that would fall outside of that space and beyond the scope of the method. Further, I am concerned about the depth of an analysis that can be made using the methods discussed; human communication is richly detailed and capturing that detail requires a holistic approach, taking both content and structure of communication.
I am curious to know more about the limitations of the methodology discussed in the reading. My first thought is that content analysis allows access to a particular cognitive space in which information is communicated between individuals but there is much of social life that would fall outside of that space and beyond the scope of the method. Further, I am concerned about the depth of an analysis that can be made using the methods discussed; human communication is richly detailed and capturing that detail requires a holistic approach, taking both content and structure of communication.