Re: Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

["dsoliver@earthlink.net" <dsoliver@earthlink.net>]

>
> The main function of a QDA tool is to markup and query a set of texts,
> say, interviews with people who, for example, recently converted from
> Christianity to a different religious community. These interviews may
> contain a variety of similar statements that can be "coded" by the
> researcher who marks the relevant passages and gives them keywords
> like: experience, spirit, power, charisma and so on. A query in this
> database should for example count all the passages where, for example,
> "experience" occurs together with "charisma" and display a list of
> hits that functions as links to the original passages.
>
> Does anybody know about such a package?
>
> Best wishes,
> Sven

Dear Sven, In the early 90's when I was at the University of
California, Santa Barbara doing Ph.D. research in Discourse Functional
Linguistics, we used the DOS program Paradox (I think that was its
name) to do similar analyses. Although I could not do this myself, it
seems to me that one could write an elisp or a lisp program that would
use some combination of grep, sed, awk to accomplish what you want.

At UCSB we would transcribe spoken data. Each line of text would be
one intonation unit. Each one of those would be further marked up for
any number of things like part of speech, emotion, emphasis, new or
old topic, etc. Paradox would keep the original transcribed text
intact while creating sub files containing the mark up data. XML
didn't really exist at the time, but now seems to be a good mark up
solution.

I personally now use Linux, so I usually don't consider DOS and
Windows programs anymore. I haven't looked, but there might be
something at gnu.org that could work and work with emacs.

Good luck--Douglas