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Tropes – Reference Manual
Analysis of heterogeneous
enumerations, etc.
utterances:
open
questions,
dispatches,
The following notes concern all heterogeneous corpora, obtained by collecting within
the same file utterances coming from numerous individuals, and without linear
coherence (i.e. it is not the discourse of a single narrator, or an interaction between
several interlocutors respecting a logical sequence or a strict chronological order).
Since the propositional hashing made by Tropes is based entirely on grammatical
rules, you must use a non-ambiguous punctuation mark (question or exclamation mark)
to force the software to separate the different utterances (for example, you can add an
exclamation mark at the end of every answer to an Open question (Market research),
in order to separate it from the next one).
If the corpus includes answers to several questions, you will have to use Borders to
group the answers together and/or to separate the answers from the questions. You
will then analyze each answer separately.
If you have an indicator enabling you to form your corpus according to an external
variable (geographic area, type of population, period, etc.), you may use it to split up
the utterances into several files (each file containing, for example, the utterances
corresponding to only one variable), that you can analyze separately in order to
compare them. You can also code these variables inside the texts and then use them
as Borders.
If the corpus has no linear coherence (for example, when the utterances contained in
each file have been compiled at random, without following a particular logic), the
results depending on the chronological analyses of Tropes (Most Characteristic Parts
of text, Bundles, Episodes, Distribution graphs) will not be significant; do not try to
interpret these results.
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