Dear Joseph,

 

I looked with great interest at this paper, skeptical, as Loet could have
imagined. I will formulate my reaction in terms of two propositions, hoping
that useful answers may emerge:

 

1. To what extent are all the elements in your diagrams static elements of a
classification, without intrinsic dynamic (that is energetic) properties and
capacity for change?

 

One can map these diagrams for different moments in time and then animate a
best fit along the time axis. Since 2004 there is an algorithm for
multidimensional scaling along the time axis available that was incorporated
in visone (http://www.leydesdorff.net/visone). One thus catches the
historical dynamics.

 

The evolutionary dynamics are more difficult to capture. These are
instantiations. At the end of the paper I refer to my work on anticipatory
systems for the algorithms needed for capturing the dynamics of meaning.
Hitherto, we have not managed to capture these in relation to language. See
for a capturing in terms of representations at
http://www.leydesdorff.net/netsci/index.htm .

 

2. What aspects of meaning are not captured in the vector space you
generate? 

 

These are proxies in language. Symbolic generalization, for example, is not
captured in this way. It may be underlying, but that does not have to be the
case. 

 

In classes, for example, I sometimes ask students to make representations of
scholarly discourse, political discourse, and newspapers about a specific
issue. Then, one can observe the different frames induced by different
symbolically generalized media.

 

I took the freedom to resend this back to the FIS network.

 

Best wishes for a Happy New Year, 

Loet

 

Best wishes for a healthy and productive New Year, in which our views will
both converge and diverge!

 

Joseph

 

----- Original Message ----- 

From: Loet Leydesdorff <mailto:[email protected]>  

To: [email protected] 

Sent: Friday, December 30, 2011 9:20 AM

Subject: Re: [Fis] Common Ground - Discussion of Information
ScienceEducation

 

Visualization and Analysis of Frames in Collections of Messages:
<http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1112/1112.6286.pdf> 
Content Analysis and the Measurement of Meaning

Esther Vlieger & Loet Leydesdorff

 

A step-to-step introduction is provided on how to generate a semantic map
from a collection of messages (full texts, paragraphs or statements) using
freely available software and/or SPSS for the relevant statistics and the
visualization. The techniques are discussed in the various theoretical
contexts of (i) linguistics (e.g., Latent Semantic Analysis), (ii)
sociocybernetics and social systems theory (e.g., the communication of
meaning), and (iii) communication studies (e.g., framing and
agenda-setting). We distinguish between the communication of information in
the network space (social network analysis) and the communication of meaning
in the vector space. The vector space can be considered a generated as an
architecture by the network of relations in the network space; words are
then not only related, but also positioned. These positions are expected
rather than observed and therefore one can communicate meaning. Knowledge
can be generated when these meanings can recursively be communicated and
therefore also further codified.

 

Forthcoming in: Manuel Mora, Ovsei Gelman, Annette Steenkamp, and Maresh S.
Raisinghani (Eds.), Research Methodologies, Innovations and Philosophies in
Systems Engineering and Information Systems, Hershey PA: Information Science
Reference, 2012, pp. 322-340, doi: 10.4018/978-1-4666-0179-6.ch16.

 

 

 

Loet Leydesdorff 

Professor, University of Amsterdam

Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR), 

Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam. 

Tel.: +31-20- 525 6598; fax: +31-842239111

[email protected] ; http://www.leydesdorff.net/; 

http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ
<http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en> &hl=en  

 


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