What Is Textual Analysis?
You can get different kinds of information from any text with the help of textual analysis. This term is used for various methods of research that help to extract the literal meanings, subtext meanings, values, symbolic references, and assumptions from the texts you are researching.
The methods used for textual analysis depend on the field of study and the research goals and objectives. The main aim of such analysis is to refer the text to different contexts you are interested in - cultural, political, artistic, or social ones. Your observations will get clearer and more plausible grounds, so they will be more bias-free. However, you need to be careful about such analysis because bias may appear from the chosen method.
Definition of a Text
We call “a text” any piece of writing we face in our everyday and scientific communication. Any book, journal article, piece of advertisement, email, or transcribed interview can be a text. That is why a text is something objective that is meaningful and significant for your research, so you can also consider films, images, artifacts, and places as texts that convey specific information.
If texts are objects of research, you need to pick an adequate method for their analysis depending on their types and your research purposes.
- The use of sounds in films, episodes, dialogues, and scenery in cinematography can be analyzed for their relevancy.
- The text in short stories can be analyzed with a focus on their narrative perspective, imagery, and structure.
- Rules of a game can also function as texts and be analyzed according to the behavioral patterns they may encourage in the game participants.
- You can consider a building as a text in terms of its structure, navigation, or architectural features.
Therefore, in its broader meaning, the term “text” means every set of signs that can be used for communication and interpretation. In a narrower meaning, a text is just something that is written.
Cultural Studies, Media, and Textual Analysis
Remember that if your research refers to the fields of culture or media, textual analysis has to be the central component of it. Many cultural or media objects can be researched here as texts, for instance, social media content, music videos, podcasts, billboards or commercials, etc.
The purpose of every researcher in working with a specific theoretical pattern is to build such a framework that can be connected to contemporary cultural or political issues. These frameworks may refer to semiotics, media theory, postcolonial theory, or anything you can research, communicate the results, or make conclusions about. They can relate to such aspects of the text as the text location, elements of design, relationships with other pieces, word choice, target audience, and others.
Textual analysis used for these fields is usually qualitative and creative. This approach is right for you if you are looking for ways to point out some factors related to the social context or current politics.
Social Sciences and Textual Analysis
Social studies often use surveys, interviews, and different types of media. You can apply textual analysis to this field to make empirical conclusions about the relationships between various social institutions.
Social sciences can use both qualitative and quantitative approaches. In the quantitative approach, you will need to measure the text features in numbers. For example, you may have to detect how often social media posts repeat certain words or phrases. Or you may choose to calculate which colors are most often used for advertising products aimed at specific demographics.
You can also use other methods of analyzing texts in social studies, such as content, thematic, or discourse analysis.
Literary Studies and Textual Analysis
Literary studies use textual analysis pretty often. More than 80% of all research work in this field involves an in-depth text analysis. It can refer to any kind of literature - poems, plays, stories, or novels.
Textual analysis in literature immediately deals with writing, so it focuses on elaborated constructive elements of the text, like narrative perspective in stories or rhyme in poems. You may need to research and explain how these elements help reveal the text's meaning.
Nevertheless, if you are doing the literary analysis, the purpose of revealing the intended meaning the author wanted to hide in the text is optional. The main idea of its use is to explore unintended connections between the text and the context in which it was created, between the text and its predecessors, or between the classic text and its importance in the modern literary environment. Sometimes, the results of such analysis can be quite unexpected.
Some examples of literary analysis can demonstrate a variety of methods and approaches to it.
Harold Bloom analyzes classic poetry with the help of his own “influence theory,” while Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick uses the historical correlations between Victorian and contemporary literature to get a more extended view of its influence on the present-day views on sexuality and gender.
Final Thoughts
Textual analysis is an interesting approach to texts of their social and cultural importance. The set of methods used in this approach allows getting a more in-depth view of different aspects of human life and literary expression via the prism of various types of texts and signs the society creates to convey the most important meanings.
Opt for textual analysis if you need a universal and creative approach to your literary, media, social, and cultural studies. Be careful to avoid bias, so you may need to combine this methodology with other approaches to get more valid and reliable results.