This article examines the function of documents as a data source in qualitative research and discusses document analysis procedure in the context of actual research experiences. Targeted to research novices, the article takes a nuts‐and‐bolts approach to document analysis. It describes the nature and forms of documents, outlines the advantages and limitations of document analysis, and offers specific examples of the use of documents in the research process. The application of document analysis to a grounded theory study is illustrated.

Document Analysis as a Qualitative Research Method

Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Edited by I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave. Pp. viii, 282. £3·50, paperback £1. 1970. (Cambridge University Press.)

Examining international case studies including USA, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Laurajane Smith identifies and explores the use of heritage throughout the world.

Challenging the idea that heritage value is self-evident, and that things must be preserved because they have an inherent importance, Smith forcefully demonstrates that heritage value is not inherent in physical objects or places, but rather that these objects and places are used to give tangibility to the values that underpin different communities and to assert and affirm these values.

A practically grounded accessible examination of heritage as a cultural practice, The Uses of Heritage is global in its benefit to students and field professionals alike.

Uses of heritage

This book offers a modern approach to computational geo- metry, an area thatstudies the computational complexity of geometric problems. Combinatorial investigations play an important role in this study.

Algorithms in Combinatorial Geometry

The revolution that wasn't: a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior.

This invention is addressed to the preparation of organic dyes which are soluble in an organic solvent and which are prepared by contacting an aqueous solution of a dye which is soluble in water but insoluble in an organic media with a solution of an organic solvent of an anionic emulsifier, and then separating the aqueous phase from the organic phase containing the dye dissolved therein.

The interpretation of documents and material culture.

ion, Metaphor and Mimesis Southwest is very conscious of its own corporate ‘way of life’. A list is given on its website under the heading ‘culture’ of the desired characteristics of a Southwest person (perseverant, egalitarian, passionate), and these qualities are abstracted into the more general injunctions to be low cost and have high customer service delivery, and the mission statement talks of warmth, friendliness, individual pride and company spirit. So there are clear abstractions here that create a unity and coherence to activities across domains. Throughout this book I have shown how entanglements involve material and conceptual components. In Chapter 2 I described a pebble on a beach that was brought into different assemblies with other things depending on how it was recognized, remembered and owned. In that chapter too I described how the equipmental totality of a thing depended on the different theories about and perspectives towards it. In Chapter 3 I used the quote from Gibson that ‘an affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer’ (1986: 129). In Chapter 4 I noted that the maintenance of walls in the Yorkshire Dales depended on expert ideas about organic foods and recent collective nostalgia for a rural way of life. In Chapter 5 I showed how a sail boat had different entanglements, and different affordances depending on the perspectives of sailing, entertaining and protecting the ecosystem of the bay. These ideas about the boat are themselves tied to wider ideas about what is leisure and how the environment should be protected. So entanglements and affordances and functions are always tied to abstractions (ideas, thoughts, words, feelings and senses). These abstractions are hierarchical and nested as noted above, and they often cross domains so that humans seek unities, coherence, metaphor within different realms of experience. Abstractions are general and can often be applied to more than one domain of activity. Their transferability Hodder_c06.indd 120 2/3/2012 12:14:59 PM

Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things

Preface to the first edition Preface to the second edition 1. The problem 2. The systems approach 3. Structuralist archaeology 4. Marxist archaeology, ideology and practice 5. Archaeology and history 6. An ethnohistoric example: reconsideration of ethnoarchaeology and middle range theory 7. Contextual archaeology 8. Post-processual archaeology 9. Conclusion: archaeology as archaeology Bibliography Index.

Reading the past : current approaches to interpretation in archaeology

1. Introduction: the nature of material cultures 2. Ethnicity and symbolism in Baringo 3. Maintaining the boundaries 4. Disrupting the boundaries 5. Within the boundaries: age, sex and self-decoration 6. Hunter-gatherers and pastoralists on the Leroghi plateau 7. A state of symbiosis and conflict: the Lozi 8. Dirt, women and men: a study in the Nuba Mountains, Sudan 9. Implications for archaeology 10. Conclusions and prospects.

Ian Hodder

Papers

The interpretation of documents and material culture.

Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things

Reading the past : current approaches to interpretation in archaeology

Symbols in Action: Ethnoarchaeological Studies of Material Culture

Spatial Analysis in Archaeology.