From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Brendan Halpin Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Re: Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs? Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2007 21:33:47 +0000 Message-ID: <87ejovkqmc.fsf@wivenhoe.staff8.ul.ie> References: Reply-To: brendan.halpin@ul.ie NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: sea.gmane.org 1171316519 23942 80.91.229.12 (12 Feb 2007 21:41:59 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@sea.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2007 21:41:59 +0000 (UTC) To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Mon Feb 12 22:41:45 2007 Return-path: Envelope-to: geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1HGivT-0002nG-77 for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Mon, 12 Feb 2007 22:41:31 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1HGivS-0004L2-QJ for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Mon, 12 Feb 2007 16:41:30 -0500 Original-Path: shelby.stanford.edu!headwall.stanford.edu!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail Original-Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help Original-Lines: 46 Original-X-Trace: individual.net hH5F2IpUwLm25UZvgo/MTwg9axmtLAYRAicRqUMHKwIAAfoT12 User-Agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.0.92 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:1Lhe9YsMmsCULlM0HOFVihL/pdo= Original-Xref: shelby.stanford.edu gnu.emacs.help:145538 X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:41142 Archived-At: Sven Bretfeld writes: > An editor as powerful as Emacs should have the ability to function as > a QDA (Qualitative Data Analysis) tool. Maybe some of you have worked > with software like Atlas.ti which is only available for Windows (and > very expensive) or GTAMSAnalyzer which runs on GNU/Linux via > GNUStep. You know what I'm talking about. I don't do qualitative analysis (my colleagues are keen on NVivo) but I have gone through a similar thought process (e.g. sitting in seminars where someone was trying to sell the idea). It struck me that it would be extremely useful for other purposes too, particularly large-scale literature reviews. 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. It would be reasonably straightforward to write functions to generate reports (e.g. create a buffer containing every span tagged "backsliding", with filename and possibly related info). You could use overlays to highlight tagged spans in files. (Overlays may also give a mechanism where tagged spans could be resistant to editing, so the immutability of the source text is no longer required, as long as the overlays can be translated to the tag-structure and saved...) You could also define a hotkey in the report buffer which jumps to the highlighted span in context and vice versa. There is possibly a lot more to the workflow that I don't know about, and there is a certain amount of lisp programming involved, but it should certainly be possible to get something functional and useful quite rapidly. Regards, Brendan -- Brendan Halpin, Department of Sociology, University of Limerick, Ireland Tel: w +353-61-213147 f +353-61-202569 h +353-61-338562; Room F2-025 x 3147 mailto:brendan.halpin@ul.ie http://www.ul.ie/sociology/brendan.halpin.html