Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

[Sven Bretfeld <sven.bretfeld@relwi.unibe.ch>]

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.

As a fanatic Emacs-newbie I would find it wonderful to get rid of
Atlas.ti (my last indispensable Windows program) and to have similar
functionality within Emacs. Maybe there is already a lisp-package that
can be used for qualitative data analysis. 

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