| Abstract: | Human Communication Research's (HCR) silver anniversary provides an occasion for an examination of the journal's history of publication. This was accomplished using new procedures for computer-assisted content analysis of text. Titles of 634 HCR articles were normalized using linguistic reduction, elimination of common words and terms with indiscriminate meaning, and tokenization of phrases and compound concepts. The resulting 86 most frequently occurring tokens were submitted to hierarchical cluster analysis to study conceptual linkage. Concepts represented in HCR articles were found to group into five large clusters: media, family, conflict, and learning; culture, social organization, and self; gender and language; cognition, conversation, persuasion, and influence; and group decision making. Support and clarification are provided for findings that HCR serves as a liaison journal between mass and interpersonal communication. It is suggested that HCR's history of publication manifests a theory of communication that is rooted in social psychological traditions. |
