A Quantitative Content Analysis: Technology and Material Culture in the six Editions of Notes and Queries on Anthropology and the Manuel d'ethnographie. Metodological Note

The first aim of the present work is to make a longitudinal analysis devoted to inquiry the changes of the concept of technology and material culture, as they were actually treated in the six editions of Notes and Queries on Anthropology (hence after N&Q), which were printed from 1874 to 1951. Secondly, we will compare the six editions of N&Q with the section devoted to technologie (technology) of Mauss’ Manuel d’Ethnographie (1947, hence after MdE). We define our corpus with the following procedure: we started by comparing the contents of the section material culture of the fifth edition of N&Q (1929) with the section technologie of the MdE. Both sections were already structured in topics (or headings), and we found a good correspondence between them. This permitted us to determine a given number of topics (for instance agriculture, weaving etc.) which together represent the initial material of our corpus. Successively, we compared each topic of this initial material with the former and successive editions of N&Q, looking for substantial affinity, and we finally determined all the headings which form our corpus, being each heading our macro-textual unit ( or context unit in Krippendorff’s terminology, see Krippendorff, 2012). The present work is an example of that large sociological tradition for which content analysis is considered a quantitative approach to systematic, replicable set of procedures for compressing many words of text into fewer content categories on the base of a set of established and explicit rules of coding (Berelson, 1952; Neuendorf, 2002; Krippendorff, 2012). In opposition to many quantitative approaches, however, the present work does not sample segments of the corpus and does not address key words, because its micro-unit of analysis is the sentence and its macro-unit is composed of all the sentences of a given topic. Each heading of our corpus is subjected to a specific kind of quantitative content analysis which analyses, the structural characters of the sentences (for example, their progressive number, the number of words, type of sentence, type of genetic or syntactic similarity, type of answer expected, etc.). The main goal of our research is to evaluate the rhetoric of each heading of N&Q, their trends and changes from the first until the sixth edition, and finally to compare each heading of N&Q with the corresponding topic of the MdE. The hypothesis is that the changes occurred in the rhetoric structure of the six editions of N&Q could be representative of the conceptual, methodological, and theoretical changes of their authors. The present quantitative content analysis is of descriptive-explorative type: it aims a deeper understanding of the changes occurred in the six editions of N&Q, as far as technology and material culture are concerned. Unfortunately the current literature on N&Q remained on a qualitative foot and was not concerned with the topic of technology and material culture (see Stocking 2001, chapter 9, p164-206; Urry 1972; Coote 1987; Petch 2007). Therefore, the magnitude of the changes introduced in technology/material culture between the third and fourth edition have been evaluated at a general level only. Other changes, which occurred in the first three editions or between the fourth and fifth editions were not investigated. We sustain that a correct evaluation of the degrees of continuity or discontinuity is to be made firstly at the level of the single heading. For the workshop we present the first results which analyse only about ten headings out of thirty 32 topics, each of which will include both the French and the British texts.