Re: Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

[Jim Ottaway <j.ottaway@lse.ac.uk>]

On 11 Feb 2007, sven bretfeld wrote:

> Dear Everybody
>
> I have quite a special question, inspired by the very interesting
> recent thread which was inaccurately called "An extremely dumb
> curiosity question".
>
> 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 wrote something for my PhD research that was based on NUD.IST. It does
pretty much all that NUD.IST does: construction of hiearchical indexing
trees, coding of text units within a document, memos, searches, etc.

I found it very useful to have the QDA program integrated into Emacs.
Unfortunately QDA, as I named it, has a very clunky user interface, and
not very much documentation.

Also, I think that some things like hypertext linking between documents
and memos could be done better using something like muse. 

Nevertheless, it worked well enough for me to use it effectively for my
thesis. Now I have finished the PhD I am hoping to find some time to
make it work better. Especially since some others have expressed
interest in an Emacs QDA program [I haven't previously found many
sociologists interested in using anything other than NVivo, Atlas.Ti,
etc].

If you want to have a look, you can get it at
http://www.jeho.org/qda.tar.gz. 

Regards,

-- 
Jim Ottaway