Re: Org-mode as QDA-Software?

[Jason McBrayer <jmcbray@carcosa.net>]

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 6:43 PM, Sven Bretfeld <sven.bretfeld@gmx.ch> wrote:

> Org mode would be a nice base for bringing a good QDA-Software to the
> world of free software, isn't it? QDAS is a special type of software for
> qualitative data analysis[¹], mostly used in Sociology and related
> fields of Science. Existing programs like Atlas.ti[²] and MaxQDA[³] are
> what I deem the essence of proprietary stuff: very expensive, elitist
> and utterly unfree (but widely used by research groups who have enough
> money at their disposal).

Interestingly, I saw ads for MaxQDA plastered everywhere at the American
Anthropological Association conference recently, and immediately thought
that the best way to go about implementing a free alternative would be on
top of Emacs.  Really all it would take would be a few functions to add
user tags as text properties, and then some stuff for browsing those
tags and doing some simple analysis on them.

I mentioned this possibility to my wife, who is the linguistic
anthropologist in
the family, and hence the prospective user of this, and she categorically
shot down the idea of using emacs for handling her data, on the basis of
user-unfriendliness. But it's interesting to see that our thoughts are running
along the same lines. I'd love to work on this kind of thing (whether based on
emacs or as a standalone GPL application), but I'm afraid I can't do it unless
I can be paid for it.  :(