Re: Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

["Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

sven.bretfeld@gmx.ch 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.
> 
> 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


I do not know much about QDA tools, I have never got the time to test 
them. I remember however there was a discussion about such tools on 
RadPsyNet. Unfortunately I believe Atlas.ti was one of the tools 
mentioned and no one proposed any better or free tools, but some other 
tools were mentioned. You can find RadPsyNet here:

  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RadPsyNet-Members/

The thread I think about has the subject

  Computer Tools for Analysing Qualitative Data