This
article focuses on the application of quantitative methods in
schoolscape research, including a discussion of its advantages and
disadvantages. This article seeks to rehabilitate the quantitative by
re-theorizing the landscape in linguistic landscape (LL), moving from an
area based study of visible forms to a poststructuralist and
postempiricist interpretative study of landscapes. The article discusses
previous quantitative LL research and introduces a quantitative
approach developed by the author during a data gathering and annotation
of 6016 items. Quantitative methods can provide valuable insight to the
ordering of reality and the materialized discourses. Furthermore, they
can mitigate personal bias. They cannot provide in-depth understanding
of the analyzed items due to the inherently reductive nature of
classification. However, considering that the objects of inquiry are
discourses, not the artifacts themselves, the issue is not paramount.
Nevertheless, large scale data gathering and annotation is time
consuming, which sets practical limitations to research.