Prospéro

Prospéro is a tool for text/discourse analysis used mainly in France, developed by the Groupe de Sociologie Pragmatique et Réflexive at EHESS in Paris. It enables a sophisticated description of actor-argument configurations, including their histories and trajectories. Guided by one's research questions, one uses Prospéro as an intermediate space for recontextualizing and revisualising large, heterogeneous series of texts, for testing the consistency and robustness of a corpus as an actor-network and testing the pertinence of one's emerging concepts. It allows for several layers of representation (several types of 'coding'):
- labeling (tagging each text with external, contextual and temporal metadata); 
- enumeration (of entities, actants, collections);
- attribute-mapping (examining the qualities attributed to actants);
- pattern-matching (developing formulas, often abductively, to discern the argumentative agencements that characterise a dossier);
- building discursive configurations (categories of enunciation, modalisation and reasoning that may be prototypical for particular texts, sources, narrators or authors);
- zooming between macro- and micro-perspectives (varying the unit of analysis to explore properties such as intertextuality or narrative embedding);
- following the transformation of discursive configurations over time.

One of its great strengths is the recyclability of its coding apparatus: concepts and formulas developed in the exploration of one corpus are transposable (with minor adaptations) to another corpus in the same language as long as there is a reasonably strong generic/thematic resemblence.

In 2018 we will make available a bundle of Czech Prospéro resources developed in the exploration of the argumentative and narrative properties of media-based corpuses on politics and public policy.