The fetish of archives

Archives are primary sources of information for biographers, historians and social scientists. Yet the question about archives is how much information we overlook or transform: fiction and facts often interplay. We pinned a related question about the moral lesson present or not in archives. Do annals, chronicles, or histories settle or merely end accounts? Coupling authority and moral lesson in texts provides a way of linking archives of different degrees of accuracy: annals, chronicles, and histories. We identified the same series of events covered on three supports, as tapes, as memoir, and as film. The events in question concern the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. We ran a computer-aided content analysis of these textual data and used words into assessing, first, the risk of conflict in the data, then the mood present in the data. Pure archives, such as tapes, do not succeed in reenacting nonverbal events. It is as if only fiction or imagination, in chronicles or stories, could do justice to a 3D reality and allow it to become history by naturalizing that reality. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

What the words of war can tell us about the risk of war

McClelland (1975) argued that reform movements have the unintended result of creating an action orientation that makes war possible. The use of one's own accumulated power to save the others is often the link between an imperial motivation pattern (i.e., the gap created between a high need for power and a low need for affiliation) and later wars. Conflict-related documents, real and fictional, were analyzed with the help of the new Motive Dictionary, a computer-readable thesaurus devised to detect the power and affiliation motives in texts supposed to contain them. Results confirm McClelland's theory. An increasing gap between affiliation and power words consistently precedes the outbreak of wars including World War I and the war in Iraq (2003-)

Disponibilité et fréquence du vocabulaire : les adjectifs qualificatifs

Summary Subjective word availability measures are compared to objective frequency-counts as for the adjectival class. Samples are made up of 100 children and so many adults. From the correlation matrix thus obtained between both kinds of data, two clusters emerge : the one corresponds to the internal variable of word availability, the other to the external variable of objective frequency. It is hypothesized that the ability underlying subjective word availability is part of the process of creating and understanding sentences, as far as paradigmatic and, possibly, syntagmatic constraints are concerned.Résumé On compare, à propos du vocabulaire des adjectifs qualificatifs, des estimations subjectives d'utilité à des relevés objectifs de fréquence. Les échantillons sont constitués de 100 enfants et d'autant d'adultes. A partir des corrélations entre l'un et l'autre type de données, se dégagent deux grappes correspondant, l'une à la variable interne de disponibilité, l'autre à la variable externe de fréquence objective. On émet l'hypothèse selon laquelle la capacité d'estimation subjective de la fréquence des mots joue un rôle, au niveau des contraintes paradigmatiques, sinon syntagmatiques, dans le processus de génération et de compréhension de la phrase.Hogenraad Robert. Disponibilité et fréquence du vocabulaire : les adjectifs qualificatifs. In: L'année psychologique. 1969 vol. 69, n°2. pp. 407-419

Fear in the West: a sentiment analysis using a computer-readable “Fear Index”

We tune in on fear to make it visible and detect its drifts. We collect verbal signals of coming fear burrowed in the crackles of political and other speeches by leading figures: Familiar words people use to express fear. From the EmoLex database (Mohammad and Turney in Comput Intel 29(3):436–465, 2013), we develop a computer-readable “Fear Index” to chase fear in the West. We aim a view from above to see how fear has changed, or hasn’t. We first look how valid is the “Fear Index” on texts (fearful novels and historical documents) expected to display specific profiles of fear. Then trace the trend fear follows in speeches of European leaders. The “Fear Index” decreases in the speeches and documents of European political and economic spheres (President Donald Tusk—European Council—, President Mario Draghi—European Central Bank—, and the Global Trade Alert agency). The “Fear Index” spirals upwards among humanitarian leaders (Pope Francis, the Archbishop Justin Welby, and the International Committee of the Red Cross). We record no significant change in the trend of the “Fear Index” in the speeches of President Vladimir Putin. Humanitarian and political leaders changing in counterpoint prompt questions about empathy, or lack of that, in a now bipolar West

L'évolution de la contrainte du contexte sur le processus de signification dans deux cas de socioanalyse.

Thèse de doctorat -- Université catholique de Louvain, 196

A history of threat in Europe and Belgium (1920-1993)

A general index of social, economic, and political threat in Europe and Belgium was developed for the years 1920 to 1993. We asked 91 Belgian historians, experts in contemporary history, to rate, on 7-point intensity scales, the extent to which each year, between 1920 to 1993, the security and existence of either Europe or Belgium was threatened. In making their judgments, the historians must integrate most of the information contained in objective data known to them as causes of fear (crime, unemployment, apprehension at starting a family, buying a car, or starting a new business, etc.). The present threat index rests on a synthetic judgment because many official objective data available to historians either are incomplete or lack conceptual coherence. The index obtained has then been compared to known objective indicators of social, economic, or political threat. We obtained Cronbach's alpha coefficients of 0.99 for Belgian historians. Corrected for serial dependency, the threat index for Belgium is found to depend on a 5-variable subset composed of: suicide, unemployment, and balance of trade, for the positive associations; and GNP and car registrations, for the negative associations. The Pearson correlation between the threat index for Europe and Belgium is 0.95 (N = 74, p < 0.001). Just as McCann and Stewin (1990) had developed a similar tool for North America, the aim of this multi-purpose tool was to monitor the mood of Europe and Belgium over time based on evaluations made by professional historians. McCann and Stewin's (1990) threat index for the US has a Pearson correlation of 0.65 (N = 67, p < 0.001) with the European threat index. The article concludes with a discussion first on the question of the role of threat producing discourses in the perception of threat, and second, on the question of Europe as a concept

Le phénomène de la satiation sémantique

Jakobovits Leon A., Hogenraad Robert. Le phénomène de la satiation sémantique. In: Bulletin de psychologie, tome 22 n°273, 1968. pp. 140-149

On the thread of discourse : Homogeneity, trends, and rhythms in texts

Content analysts share with literary critics a vested interest in the text, which is their common world. Both further share the presence of an observer (the critic or analyst). Apart from that, content analysis and literary critic differ on one basic issue. Between the content analyst and the text, one finds a dictionary i.e., a thesaurus that is semantic in nature. On the other hand, between the literary critic and the text, there is no such objective tool, such as the content analysis dictionary. These introductory remarks are useful on two grounds. First, they help to settle the place of content analysis in the world of textual analysis. Secondly, they identify the concepts that content analysis needs to expand when speaking about itself —i.e., procedures, dictionaries, and texts. Before moving any further, a remark is in order. Once processed by content analysis (through the dictionary), the text is really no more the same as before. In one sense, the text is less than before because, by its very nature, the dictionary orders content along one dimension at a time; but, in another sense, the text is also more than before because the dictionary adds knowledge, thought limited, to the text. This results in a redescription that is both repeatable and controlable. Note that the text analyzed by qualitative textual analysis (literary critic or political analysis) is also redescribed, gaining a new reading, yet a reading of the text as it was before. In other words, content analysis and qualitative textual analysis both produce a redescription of the text, but content analysis further produces an instrumental transformation of the text. It is the purpose of the present paper to demonstrate the power of a fine-grained procedure of content analysis (as opposed to an analysis by gross aggregates). In particular, we want to bring the demonstration to bear on issues related to the theory of language performance, to the measurement model involved, to the statistical requirements, and, to the quality and quantity of the resulting information usable by the social sciences. Texts used to demonstrate the efficacy of the procedure are of two sorts, political pamphlets, written expressedly to justify political violence, and other texts, mostly short stories, used as contrasts to the political pamphlets. All mentioned texts are scanned through general dictionaries, appropriate to the nature of the texts, that order their content along several dimensions