  The automated analysis of digital human communication data often focuses on
specific aspects such as content or network structure in isolation. This can
provide limited perspectives while making cross-methodological analyses,
occurring in domains like investigative journalism, difficult. Communication
research in psychology and the digital humanities instead stresses the
importance of a holistic approach to overcome these limiting factors. In this
work, we conduct an extensive survey on the properties of over forty
semi-automated communication analysis systems and investigate how they cover
concepts described in theoretical communication research. From these
investigations, we derive a design space and contribute a conceptual framework
based on communication research, technical considerations, and the surveyed
approaches. The framework describes the systems' properties, capabilities, and
composition through a wide range of criteria organized in the dimensions (1)
Data, (2) Processing and Models, (3) Visual Interface, and (4) Knowledge
Generation. These criteria enable a formalization of digital communication
analysis through visual analytics, which, we argue, is uniquely suited for this
task by tackling automation complexity while leveraging domain knowledge. With
our framework, we identify shortcomings and research challenges, such as group
communication dynamics, trust and privacy considerations, and holistic
approaches. Simultaneously, our framework supports the evaluation of systems
and promotes the mutual exchange between researchers through a structured
common language, laying the foundations for future research on communication
analysis.
