IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/scient/v67y2006i2d10.1007_s11192-006-0096-y.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Measuring the meaning of words in contexts: An automated analysis of controversies about 'Monarch butterflies,' 'Frankenfoods,' and 'stem cells'

Author

Listed:
  • Loet Leydesdorff

    (University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR))

  • Iina Hellsten

    (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Virtual Knowledge Studio)

Abstract

Summary Co-words have been considered as carriers of meaning across different domains in studies of science, technology, and society. Words and co-words, however, obtain meaning in sentences, and sentences obtain meaning in their contexts of use. At the science/society interface, words can be expected to have different meanings: the codes of communication that provide meaning to words differ on the varying sides of the interface. Furthermore, meanings and interfaces may change over time. Given this structuring of meaning across interfaces and over time, we distinguish between metaphors and diaphors as reflexive mechanisms that facilitate the translation between contexts. Our empirical focus is on three recent scientific controversies: Monarch butterflies, Frankenfoods, and stem-cell therapies. This study explores new avenues that relate the study of co-word analysis in context with the sociological quest for the analysis and processing of meaning.

Suggested Citation

  • Loet Leydesdorff & Iina Hellsten, 2006. "Measuring the meaning of words in contexts: An automated analysis of controversies about 'Monarch butterflies,' 'Frankenfoods,' and 'stem cells'," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 67(2), pages 231-258, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:67:y:2006:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-006-0096-y
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-006-0096-y
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-006-0096-y
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11192-006-0096-y?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ciarli, Tommaso & Ràfols, Ismael, 2019. "The relation between research priorities and societal demands: The case of rice," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 48(4), pages 949-967.
    2. Peter W. Liesch & Lars Håkanson & Sara L. McGaughey & Stuart Middleton & Julia Cretchley, 2011. "The evolution of the international business field: a scientometric investigation of articles published in its premier journal," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 88(1), pages 17-42, July.
    3. Matias Federico Milia & Ariadna Nebot Giralt & Rigas Arvanitis, 2022. "Local emergence, global expansion: understanding the structural evolution of a bi-lingual national research landscape," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(12), pages 7369-7395, December.
    4. Sasson, Elan & Ravid, Gilad & Pliskin, Nava, 2015. "Improving similarity measures of relatedness proximity: Toward augmented concept maps," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 9(3), pages 618-628.
    5. Zhongyi Wang & Jing Chen & Jiangping Chen & Haihua Chen, 2024. "Identifying interdisciplinary topics and their evolution based on BERTopic," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 129(11), pages 7359-7384, November.
    6. Oscar Stuhler, 2022. "Who Does What to Whom? Making Text Parsers Work for Sociological Inquiry," Sociological Methods & Research, , vol. 51(4), pages 1580-1633, November.
    7. Fengjun Sun & Lijun Zhu, 2012. "Citation genetic genealogy: a novel insight for citation analysis in scientific literature," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 91(2), pages 577-589, May.
    8. Bart Thijs, 2020. "Using neural-network based paragraph embeddings for the calculation of within and between document similarities," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(2), pages 835-849, November.
    9. Yi Bu & Mengyang Li & Weiye Gu & Win‐bin Huang, 2021. "Topic diversity: A discipline scheme‐free diversity measurement for journals," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 72(5), pages 523-539, May.
    10. Jian Zhang & Michael S. Vogeley & Chaomei Chen, 2011. "Scientometrics of big science: a case study of research in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 86(1), pages 1-14, January.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:67:y:2006:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-006-0096-y. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.