Editing Content analysis (section)

=== History ===
Content analysis is research using the categorization and classification of speech, written text, interviews, images, or other forms of communication.  In its beginnings, using the first newspapers at the end of the 19th century, analysis was done manually by measuring the number of columns given a subject. The approach can also be traced back to a university student studying patterns in Shakespeare's literature in 1893.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Sumpter|first=Randall S.|date=July 2001|title=News about News|journal=Journalism History|volume=27|issue=2|pages=64–72|doi=10.1080/00947679.2001.12062572|s2cid=140499059|issn=0094-7679}}</ref>

Over the years, content analysis has been applied to a variety of scopes. [[Hermeneutics]] and [[philology]] have long used content analysis to interpret sacred and profane texts and, in many cases, to attribute texts' [[authorship]] and [[authentication|authenticity]].<ref name="Tipaldo 2014 42"/><ref name="Krippendorff2004">{{cite book|last=Krippendorff|first=Klaus|title=Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology|year=2004|publisher=Sage|location=Thousand Oaks, CA|isbn=9780761915454|pages=413|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=q657o3M3C8cC|edition=2nd}}</ref>

In recent times, particularly with the advent of [[mass communication]], content analysis has known an increasing use to deeply analyze and understand media content and media logic. 
The political scientist [[Harold Lasswell]] formulated the core questions of content analysis in its early-mid 20th-century mainstream version: "Who says what, to whom, why, to what extent and with what effect?".<ref>{{cite book |last1=Lasswell |first1=Harold |editor1-last=Bryson |editor1-first=L. |title=The Communication of Ideas |date=1948 |publisher=Harper and Row |location=New York |page=216 |url=http://sipa.jlu.edu.cn/__local/E/39/71/4CE63D3C04A10B5795F0108EBE6_A7BC17AA_34AAE.pdf |chapter=The Structure and Function of Communication in Society}}</ref> The strong emphasis for a quantitative approach started up by Lasswell was finally carried out by another "father" of content analysis, [[Bernard Berelson]], who proposed a definition of content analysis which, from this point of view, is emblematic: "a research technique for the objective, systematic and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication".<ref name="Berelson1952">{{cite book|last=Berelson| first=B.|title=Content Analysis in Communication Research|year=1952|publisher=Free Press|location=Glencoe|pages=18}}</ref>

Quantitative content analysis has enjoyed a renewed popularity in recent years thanks to technological advances, being fruitfully applied in mass and personal communication research. Content analysis of textual [[big data]] produced by [[new media]], particularly [[social media]] and [[mobile devices]] has become popular. These approaches take a simplified view of language that ignores the complexity of [[semiosis]], the process by which meaning is formed out of language. Quantitative content analysts have been criticized for limiting the scope of content analysis to simple counting, and for applying the measurement methodologies of the natural sciences without reflecting critically on their appropriateness to social science.<ref name=":0">{{Cite book|title=Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology|url=https://archive.org/details/contentanalysisi00krip_916|url-access=limited|last=Krippendorff|first=Klaus|publisher=Sage|year=2004|isbn=978-0-7619-1544-7|location=California|pages=[https://archive.org/details/contentanalysisi00krip_916/page/n101 87]–89}}</ref> Conversely, qualitative content analysts have been criticized for being insufficiently systematic and too impressionistic.<ref name=":0" /> Krippendorff argues that quantitative and qualitative approaches to content analysis tend to overlap, and that there can be no generalisable conclusion as to which approach is superior.<ref name=":0" />

Content analysis can also be described as studying [[Trace evidence|traces]], which are documents from past times, and artifacts, which are non-linguistic documents. Texts are understood to be produced by communication processes in a broad sense of that phrase—often gaining mean through [[Abductive reasoning|abduction]].<ref name="Tipaldo 2014 42"/><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Timmermans |first1=Stefan |last2=Tavory |first2=Iddo |title=Theory Construction in Qualitative Research |journal=Sociological Theory |date=2012 |volume=30 |issue=3 |pages=167–186 |doi=10.1177/0735275112457914 |s2cid=145177394 |url=http://grap.ulb.ac.be/wp-content/uploads/Timmermans-and-Tavory_Abductive-Analysis.pdf |access-date=2018-12-09 |archive-date=2019-08-19 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190819065302/http://grap.ulb.ac.be/wp-content/uploads/Timmermans-and-Tavory_Abductive-Analysis.pdf |url-status=dead }}</ref>