Textual Analysis

The starting point for our study consisted of two different kinds of analysis of 51 texts authored by 45 astronauts and cosmonauts either during their space travel (n= 17) -available at http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ johnson/astronauts/journals_astronauts.html – or after their return to earth (n= 34). These texts captured details of their visual and affective experiences during space flight in the Shuttle or the International Space Station (ISS). The majority of the selected texts involved descriptions of experiences undergone while looking out of the space vehicle’s windows with views of earth or deep space from close earth orbit. For purposes of analysis, numbers from 1 to 51 were assigned and information about the author, including name, was not included. In other words, the text spoke for itself, irrelevant of demographics or personal identifiers. The first analysis was syntactical – looking at aspects of structure in regard to coherence and degrees of abstractness; the second hermeneutical – focused on contextual meaning. The syntactical analysis We conducted a syntactical analysis using the Coh-Metrix computer software developed in the Psychology Department at the University of Memphis (http://cohmetrix.memphis.edu). Coh-Metrix analyzes the coherence of texts based on a wide range of measures (Graesser et al. 2004). We were interested in a number of questions that Coh-Metrix can answer. One of the things we wanted to know is whether there are significant differences between the in-flight journals and the post-flight descriptions found in interviews and books. Preliminary results indicate causal cohesion and differentiation of concreteness versus abstractness of the narratives.