Relaciones, redes y discurso

Revisión y propuestas en torno al análisis reticular de datos textuales

Abstract

The article reviews different proposals in the field of sociology (or neighbouring disciplines)
that use some instrumental and/or conecptual elements of Social Network Analysis to realise the
analysis of texts and/or discourses. Although the relationist approach has an evident tradition in
discourse analysis, the proposals that apply the idea of network and the concepts of social networks
to text analysis have appeared only in the decade of the eighties. However, some of these proposals
do not overcome the problems of categorial analysis, which have as a main drawback the
fragmentation of text. Only some of the proposals use the network approach to preserve the
articulation of text and its semantic and syntactic structures. Jointly with an exhaustive examination
of these latter proposals and their forerunners, the article presents a collection of procedures —that
the authors have called Network Discourse Analysis— that develop the network perspective applied
to text analysis and that insist particularly on the work of interpretation and con-textualization of
discourse.