Content analysis

Content analysis is "a wide and heterogeneous set of manual or computer-assisted techniques for contextualized interpretations of documents produced by communication processes in the strict sense of that phrase (any kind of text, written, iconic, multimedia, etc.) or signification processes (traces and artifacts), having as ultimate goal the production of valid and trustworthy inferences."

Though the locution "content analysis" has come to be a sort of 'umbrella term' referring to an almost boundless set of quite diverse research approaches and techniques, it is still today in use in the Social and Computer Science Domains and in the Humanities to identify methods for studying and/or retrieving meaningful information from documents. In a more focused way, "content analysis" refers to a family of techniques oriented to the study of "mute evidence" of texts and artifacts. Texts come from communication processes in a narrow sense of that phrase (i.e. types of communication intentionally activated by a sender, using a code sufficiently shared with the receiver). There are 5 types of texts in content analysis: