From Words to Numbers: Narrative, Data, and Social Science (Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences)

Departing radically from traditional content analysis approaches to the quantitative study of texts, this work is based on a linguistic theory of narrative, rather than the ad hoc approaches of context analysis. The book illustrates a set of tools--story grammars, relational data models, and network models--that can be profitably used for the collection, organization, and analysis of narrative data in socio-historical research (e.g., narratives of strikes, demonstrations, lynchings, and riots).