Research Paper

1
Research Paper

• Remember the assignment
• RESEARCH EXERCISE The battle over Confederation
  in Nova Scotia was fought in the media as much as
  in the legislative assembly. Howe began the
  public campaign against Confederation by
  publishing a series of editorials, the
  Botheration Letters, in the Morning Chronicle
  (owned by his friend Annand). McCully and Tupper
  responded using the Unionist Halifax Journal as
  their mouthpiece. Use the selected editorials
  from the Morning Chronicle and the Unionist to
  test Riker's theories about rhetorical
  interaction in political campaigns. Present your
  data, methods, and results in a 5-page research
  essay.

2
Research Paper

• Address the assignment
• Re-read
• Rikers theoretical argument data analysis
• Moores chapter on Tupper Howe
• Implicitly, you are being asked, How do you know
  what you know?
• Could another person take your paper, analyze the
  same data, and arrive at similar conclusions?
• Have you eliminated plausible confounding
  explanations for the patterns that you see in the
  data?

3
Research Paper

• Five pages extra pages for charts graphs,
  etc.
• Remember
• Graphs, figures, tables are not self-explanatory
• You need to
• Walk reader through the construction of table
  etc.
• Tell reader the implications of contents of
  table, graph etc.

4
Research Paper

• Basic Structure
• Introduction Background to the battle between
  Howe and Tupper
• Rikers Theory of Rhetoric (you dont have to do
  all of Riker, you may focus on negative
  campaigning or dominance and dispersion)
• What do you expect to see in the data if Riker is
  right about rhetoric?
• What should you NOT see in the data if Riker is
  right about rhetoric?
• The Data what are your data, and how you
  classify / assess the data
• Presentation and discussion of your results
• Conclusion

5
Research Paper

• Using TextStat
• Note TextStat is merely a tool you do not need
  to use it if you dont wisht to but it does
  make things easier!
• You have to start by creating a corpus (icon on
  far left)
• Corpus is simply a container into which you
  will deposit some text
• Now place text into your corpus (cylindrical
  icons)
• You want to load a local file into the corpus

6
Research Paper

• TextStat allows two types of analysis
• Word Frequencies
• Simply counts the number of times a word shows up
  in the text
• Use the table icon on the right
• Concordance
• Shows the contextual use of a word by creating a
  window of characters to the left and right of
  the key word
• You can use citation button for each fragment to
  see passage of text its from
• You can use query button to look for
  co-occurrences of words (e.g., free trade)