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Grasping cities through literary representations: a mix of qualitative and quantitative approaches to analyze crime novels
Städte durch ihre literarischen Repräsentationen erfassen: ein Mix aus Qualitativen und Quantitativen Ansätzen zur Analyse von Kriminalromanen
[journal article]
Abstract Contemporary crime novels often contain detailed literary representations of urban life worlds. These stagings can provide access to city-specific patterns and structures of thought, action and feeling, as well as locally established bodies of knowledge and processes of sense-making. Therefore, thei... view more
Contemporary crime novels often contain detailed literary representations of urban life worlds. These stagings can provide access to city-specific patterns and structures of thought, action and feeling, as well as locally established bodies of knowledge and processes of sense-making. Therefore, their systematic analysis can generate insights into the intrinsic logic of cities. To grasp such patterns on city level a preferably broad empirical basis is needed, but the study of large amounts of literary works poses a methodological challenge. This article presents a mix of methods that permits the analysis of vast quantities of (literary) texts through combining the classical qualitative close reading with elements from computer-aided qualitative content analysis, basic instruments from corpus linguistics and the methodology of distant reading in an iterative research process. It illustrates how to analyze qualitative data also quantitatively and on different levels with regard to social and spatial aspects of the depicted life worlds, thereby showing how novels could be used as data basis for urban sociology and interdisciplinary research questions about the distinctiveness of cities.... view less
Keywords
zone; linguistics; quantitative method; qualitative method; urban sociology; town; urban research; detective novel; content analysis; text analysis
Classification
Methods and Techniques of Data Collection and Data Analysis, Statistical Methods, Computer Methods
Research Design
Sociology of Settlements and Housing, Urban Sociology
Method
development of methods; basic research
Free Keywords
intrinsic logic of cities; novels as data; quantitative literary analysis; close reading; distant reading; corpus linguistic; mixed methods; space
Document language
English
Publication Year
2014
Page/Pages
p. 68-102
Journal
Historical Social Research, 39 (2014) 2
Issue topic
Spatial analysis
DOI
https://doi.org/10.12759/hsr.39.2014.2.68-102
ISSN
0172-6404
Status
Published Version; peer reviewed