Re: Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

[sven.bretfeld@gmx.ch]

On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 01:48:24PM -0800, Drew Adams wrote:
> > Lisp alone could get you a long way, if you're comfortable with it.
> > If all you are doing is applying tags (i.e. an open-ended set of
> > categories) to spans of text, you need something that stores
> > structures like '(filename start end tag) [for text in FILENAME
> > from point START to point END, tag it with TAG]. You could use
> > completion functions to enter the tag, to remind you of what you've
> > already used. This assumes the source texts are immutable, of
> > course, otherwise start and end become unreliable.
> 
> Sorry, I have no idea what this is all about, but your description makes me
> think that Icicles tagged regions might help. They are a persistent set of
> named start and end locations, together with buffer names (which can be
> filenames). And you can use completion with them.
> http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/Icicles_-_Multiple_Regions.

Thanks to all for your suggestions. Regretably I'm not a
developer. I'm doing hard to learn how to configure my .emacs
file. But I think writing a QDA mode might be a task that could be
welcomed by many people. Every university seems to have hundreds of
people and teams using QDA methods in humanities and social sciences
of different flavours, including medical sociology and
psychology. Propriatory software is very expensive and ties users to a
specific software solution and its upgrades (I had to buy vm-ware
workstation only to use Atlas.ti under GNU/Linux). The only QDA tool
running under GNU is GTAMSAnalyzer which is hardly as powerful as, I
feel, an Emacs solution could be.

Brandon described what has to be done quite well as far as I can
tell. And yes, it could be used for many things apart from QDA. I, for
example, also use(d) Atlas.ti as a kind of "knowledge storehouse" by
making excerpts to every piece of scientific literature I read, coding
them with specific labels. This makes up a system of interrelated
memos similar to the information storage system that enabled the
famous German sociologist Niklas Luhmann to write one thick book per
year (he collected information on paper storing them in an
"algorhythm" that only he himself understood). I think that might be
the large scale literature reviews that you have in mind, Brandon.

I will have a look at Icicles tomorrow. Maybe my skills are sufficient
to produce a rudimentary solution myself. It would be enough to have
the memos of my present project available in Emacs with tagged
regions. I will see.

Sven