The Mary Junck Research Colloquium Series Spring 2008
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School of Journalism and Mass Communication University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Dr. Craig Carroll
Assistant Professor School of Journalism and Mass Communication UNC-Chapel Hill
Feb. 7	Computer-aided text analysis in business, politics and media: History, theory, and empirical evidence with DICTION 5.0
	Computer aided text analysis has become widely accepted in the social sciences. This presentation reviews the use of DICTION in business, politics, and media research. If only five questions could be asked of a text, Hart (2000) argues that the five master concepts examined with DICTION would provide the most robust understanding. The five master concepts include (1) Optimism: Language endorsing some person, group, concept or event or highlighting their positive entailments; (2) Activity: Language featuring movement, change, the implementation of ideas and the avoidance of inertia; (3) Realism: Language describing tangible, immediate, recognizable matters that affect people's everyday lives; and (4) Commonality: Language highlighting the agreed-upon values of a group and rejecting idiosyncratic modes of engagement; and (5) Certainty: Language indicating resoluteness, inflexibility, and completeness and a tendency to speak ex cathedra. Correlations among these master variables are largely non-existent, thereby affording the researcher five completely unique examinations of the passage being analyzed. The program has been heavily used to study political messages, but it has also been used to examine media reportage, corporate annual reports and vision statements, historical and literary documents, economic forecasting, medical documents, crisis communications and, increasingly, web sites and internet traffic.  This presentation reviews previous research, its core theoretical assumptions, and provides an overview of the types of studies that can be examined using DICTION.
If you would like additional details/information about the colloquium series, or have any suggestions, please contact Sriram "Sri" Kalyanaraman E-mail: sri@unc.edu Phone: 919-843-5858