# The Statement Not Given By:: [[Ross Jackson]] 2024-10-13 Textual analysis is constrained to what was said or what was written. It cannot analyze the statement that is not given. And yet, there are many cases in which people withhold their thoughts. When people self-edit. Just as survey data are limited by the fact that some people do not take surveys, one never knows the complete picture because one can never capture the thoughts of those who do not fill out surveys. One doesn’t know what the statements not given mean. People withhold comment for a variety of reasons. Maybe the comment is inappropriate. Maybe it’s controversial. Maybe it is too revealing. Or maybe the person is uncomfortable or unwilling to divulge one’s thoughts to others. In a way, all textual analysis falls victim to the survivorship bias. At a minimum, textual analysis is constrained by who speaks and how and who doesn’t speak or doesn’t get recorded as speaking. Some voices are amplified in textual analysis. Others are muted. Problems arise when one accepts anything as a given. Anything that exists reflects a certain structure. That structure contains biases and privileges. For much of recorded history, only the elite were literate. As literacy rates improved, only the wealthy had sufficient leisure time to write consistently. Even when these elements are/were addressed, social conventions influence a person’s assessment of whether they have something meaningful to say by writing. One could make the case that textual analysis can only be an analysis of the atypical, as most people do not tend to write. It might be enlightening to examine a collection of statements not given. #### Related Items [[Analytics]] [[Natural Language Processing]] [[Cognitive Biases]] [[Writing]] [[Influence]] [[Nothingness]] [[Perspective]]