Home  About us  Contact
 

Text Analysis (text + analysis)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Law and Criminology40%

Selected Abstracts

European Union Constitution-Making, Political Identity and Central European Reflections

EUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 2 2005

It analyses both the temporal and spatial dimensions of constitution-making and addresses the problems of political identity related to ethnic divisions and civic demos. It starts by summarising the major arguments supporting the Union's constitution-making project and emphasises the Union's symbolic power as a polity built on the principles of civil society and parliamentary democracy. The EU's official rejection of ethnically based political identity played an important symbolic role in post-Communist constitutional and legal transformations in Central Europe in the 1990s. In the following part, the text analyses the temporal dimension of the EU's identity-building and constitution-making and emphasises its profoundly future-oriented structure. The concept of identity as the ,future in process' is the only option of how to deal with the absence of the European demos. Furthermore, it initiates the politically much-needed constitution-making process. The following spatial analysis of this process emphasises positive aspects of the horizontal model of constitution-making, its elements in the Convention's deliberation and their positive effect on the Central European accession states. The article concludes by understanding the emerging European identity as a multi-level identity of civil political virtues surrounded by old loyalties and traditions, which supports the conversational model of liberal democratic politics, reflects the continent's heterogeneity and leads to the beneficial combination of universal principles and political realism. [source]

Human assessments of document similarity

JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, Issue 8 2010
S.J. Westerman
Two studies are reported that examined the reliability of human assessments of document similarity and the association between human ratings and the results of n-gram automatic text analysis (ATA). Human interassessor reliability (IAR) was moderate to poor. However, correlations between average human ratings and n-gram solutions were strong. The average correlation between ATA and individual human solutions was greater than IAR. N-gram length influenced the strength of association, but optimum string length depended on the nature of the text (technical vs. nontechnical). We conclude that the methodology applied in previous studies may have led to overoptimistic views on human reliability, but that an optimal n-gram solution can provide a good approximation of the average human assessment of document similarity, a result that has important implications for future development of document visualization systems. [source]

Circumstances of fatal lockout/tagout-related injuries in manufacturing

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL MEDICINE, Issue 10 2008
Maria T. Bulzacchelli PhD
Abstract Background Over the past few decades, hundreds of manufacturing workers have suffered fatal injuries while performing maintenance and servicing on machinery and equipment. Using lockout/tagout procedures could have prevented many of these deaths. Methods A narrative text analysis of OSHA accident investigation report summaries was conducted to describe the circumstances of lockout/tagout-related fatalities occurring in the US manufacturing industry from 1984 to 1997. Results The most common mechanisms of injury were being caught in or between parts of equipment, electrocution, and being struck by or against objects. Typical scenarios included cleaning a mixer or blender, cleaning a conveyor, and installing or disassembling electrical equipment. Lockout procedures were not even attempted in the majority (at least 58.8%) of fatal incidents reviewed. Conclusions Lockout/tagout-related fatalities occur under a wide range of circumstances. Enhanced training and equipment designs that facilitate lockout and minimize worker contact with machine parts may prevent many lockout/tagout-related injuries. Am. J. Ind. Med. 51:728,734, 2008. Published 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]

Treating Words as Data with Error: Uncertainty in Text Statements of Policy Positions

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2009
Kenneth Benoit
Political text offers extraordinary potential as a source of information about the policy positions of political actors. Despite recent advances in computational text analysis, human interpretative coding of text remains an important source of text-based data, ultimately required to validate more automatic techniques. The profession's main source of cross-national, time-series data on party policy positions comes from the human interpretative coding of party manifestos by the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP). Despite widespread use of these data, the uncertainty associated with each point estimate has never been available, undermining the value of the dataset as a scientific resource. We propose a remedy. First, we characterize processes by which CMP data are generated. These include inherently stochastic processes of text authorship, as well as of the parsing and coding of observed text by humans. Second, we simulate these error-generating processes by bootstrapping analyses of coded quasi-sentences. This allows us to estimate precise levels of nonsystematic error for every category and scale reported by the CMP for its entire set of 3,000-plus manifestos. Using our estimates of these errors, we show how to correct biased inferences, in recent prominently published work, derived from statistical analyses of error-contaminated CMP data. [source]

Intellectual Property Rights in the Making: The Evolution of Intellectual Property Provisions in US Free Trade Agreements and Access to Medicine

THE JOURNAL OF WORLD INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, Issue 5 2007
Gaëlle P. Krikorian
Examining 14 US free trade agreements (FTAs), this article presents a text analysis of their intellectual property (IP) provisions with reference to patents and data protection. For each type of provision present in a given FTA, a "unit of protection" is assigned in that category. This method allows us to estimate the evolution in protection for each type of provision, both relative to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights standard and from one agreement to the next. The analysis reveals a global increase in IP rights (IPR) protection, as the agreements get more stringent and specific provisions get more intricate and complex. But it also shows that the increase of IPR protection is not strictly linear over time and that some variation does exist in the outcomes of the negotiations. Nevertheless, IPR is clearly on the rise, and close comparative analysis of the different texts sheds light on the process of the setting of these new standards. Ultimately, this analysis provides a snapshot of the challenges that will soon be brought to bear on the policies on access to medicine in developing countries. [source]