From CAQDAS to Text Mining. The Domain Ontology as a Model of Knowledge Representation About Qualitative Research Practices

Abstract

The nature of qualitative research practices is multiparadigmaticity which creates coexistence of different research and analytical approaches. This paper is a methodological reflection on how the process of qualitative data analysis is developing, moving from traditional CAQDAS coding procedures through Content Analysis dictionary-based approach towards the textual data exploration for knowledge discovery in corpora using Natural Language Processing and Text Mining procedures. This change is described on the example of the process of analyzing and discovering the ways through which qualitative research practices are conceptualized and represented in the vivid language of scholarly articles. Taking into account the problem of a “curse of abundance” in the present-day field of qualitative research I try to organize and articulate these practices in a legible system of knowledge representation employing the information concept of domain ontology. In the process of building the ontology of the contemporary field of qualitative research practices, I link know-how drawn from sociology, social science computing, NLP and text mining, digital humanities and corpus linguistics.