It becomes harder and harder these days to find something to write about which I personally would find worthwhile as a reader. The technicalities and, truely, banalities of discourse analysis do not qualify as such, I think. On the other hand, the things I am doing right now - looking at the discourse fragments, counting and weighing the different topics and their mentioning against each other - have not really been described in any handbook or some such as yet, I mean beyond someone saying "and then you count the different topics and put them in some kind of order". This may be due to discourse analysis only just becoming a favoured method of analysis in the social sciences, or simply to the dryness of most of the actual analysing. Well. I can tell you that even though I had only asked for or given impulses on 60 different topics, all related to water in the Middle East, of course, the fragments I have analysed on the Palestinian side consist of about 500 different topoi. Even though this number still includes doubles (like Israeli control or politicising of the resource), this gives you an impression of what I am dealing with here. Currently, I am re-reading all fragments and counting how often one topic or another has been mentioned to get an indication for their respective importance. The same will have to be done, of course, with the Israeli fragments. Not exactly fun, but necessary.
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