{"id":3000,"date":"2010-01-27T13:58:16","date_gmt":"2010-01-27T18:58:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theoreti.ca\/?p=3000"},"modified":"2010-01-27T13:58:16","modified_gmt":"2010-01-27T18:58:16","slug":"the-general-inquirer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=3000","title":{"rendered":"The General Inquirer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reading John B. Smith’s “Computer Criticism”, (Style<\/em>: Vol. XII, No. 4) I came a reference to a content analysis program called the The General Inquirer from the 1960s. This program still has a following and has been rewritten in Java. See the Inquirer Home Page<\/a>. There is a web version where you can try it here<\/a> (DO NOT USE A LARGE TEXT).<\/p>\n

The General Inquirer “maps” a text to a thesaurus of categories, disambiguating on the way. The web page about How the General Inquirer is used<\/a> describes what it does thus:<\/p>\n

The General Inquirer is basically a mapping tool. It maps each text file with counts on dictionary-supplied categories. The currently distributed version combines the “Harvard IV-4” dictionary content-analysis categories, the “Lasswell” dictionary content-analysis categories, and five categories based on the social cognition work of Semin and Fiedler, making for 182 categories in all. Each category is a list of words and word senses. A category such as “self references” may contain only a dozen entries, mostly pronouns. Currently, the category “negative” is our largest with 2291 entries. Users can also add additional categories of any size.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As they say later on, their categories were developed for “social-science content-analysis research applications” and not for other uses like literary study. The original developer published a book on the tool in 1966:<\/p>\n

Philip J. Stone, The General Inquirer: A Computer Approach to Content Analysis<\/em>. (Cambridge: M. I. T. Press, 1966).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading John B. Smith’s “Computer Criticism”, (Style: Vol. XII, No. 4) I came a reference to a content analysis program called the The General Inquirer from the 1960s. This program still has a following and has been rewritten in Java. See the Inquirer Home Page. There is a web version where you can try it … Continue reading The General Inquirer<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-of-computing-and-multimedia","category-text-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3000"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3001,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3000\/revisions\/3001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}