What are the benefits of a structured approach?

• find the needle
• characterise the haystack (or put the needle in context)
• validate, dismiss, correct assumptions more efficiently
• case selection, timeframe selection
• be in the position to describe what you did, and, if you didn’t find what you were looking for, move on

Examples

• discoursive:
  • has Crimea been prominent in official or media discourse before 2014?
  • when did this obsession with Russophobia, denazification, etc. start?
• finding data/evidence:
  • all sentences in Transnistria’s news that include “pension” AND either digits, percent, or rouble

Who’s using structured approaches?

• Mostly people for whom the method is central to their research:
  • content analysis
  • often discourse analysis
  • quantitatively-oriented researchers (text as data)
• their methods are often difficult to access for researchers with a different background

What are the obstacles to wider uptake?

• technical complexity
• costs
• licensing issues
• limited availability of ready-to-use corpora

How can we overcome these obstacles?

• technical complexity -> community
• costs -> community
• licensing issues -> community
• limited availability of ready-to-use corpora -> community

Easier access

• interactive interfaces / video

Pre-processed corpora

• https://tadadit.xyz/datasets/
• https://discuss-data.net/

Licensing

1. interface: just a custom search engine?
2. share it within research networks?
3. share recipe to replicate

Finally, if you do the fancy structured analysis thing, think of the readers who usually don’t

• “I did the fancy thing”
• “if you’re also able to do fancy things, here’s how you can replicate what I did”

Better:

• with one click and no technical skills, you can see what I found in its original context (example)
• even better, you can test alternative hypotheses yourself