Documental analysis of fiction: methodological aspects of applicability

Abstract

The methodological aspects of the content analysis of fiction with information retrieval purposes are discussed with a focus on the study of textual analysis for the identification of the themes treated in stories. It is assumed that the methodological procedures used for indexing scientific works do not produce satisfactory results when applied to narrative fiction documents. The aim of this paper is to present the gerative sense course as a methodology to extract themes from works of fiction, and to study its application to the indexing of tales by indexers. The methodology used is the construction of gerative sense course, identifying both the narrative level structures (manipulation, competence, performance and punishment) and the discourse level (themes and figures) in order to obtain the theme of the document. The results demonstrated the feasibility of the application of the gerative sense course to the documentary content analysis of works of fiction, in the sense that it provided a clear annotations of the theme of the document that was being indexed by the cataloguers. Several questions related to this procedure require further clarification and also a preliminary study with professionals in the form of a pilot project.