Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

[sven.bretfeld]

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

Re: Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

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

Re: Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

[Jim Ottaway]

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

Re: Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

[Graham Smith]

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Jim,

Just to add some support for this from a wider range

On 13/02/07, Jim Ottaway <j.ottaway@lse.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> help-gnu-emacs mailing list
> help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-gnu-emacs
>

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Re: Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

[Graham Smith]

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Oh dear, some how managed to hit send instead of discard :-(

What I was thinking of saying was that I have very crudely used  a similar
approach to look at expert views on environmental impacts, but only with
software that counted the occurance  of specific terms or words. I have no
experience of proper qualitative analytical tools.

I am also just beginning to use Emacs (in Windows)  and still need a lot of
hand holding, but certainly this is of interest to me as an Emacs mode.


Graham

On 13/02/07, Graham Smith <myotisone@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Jim,
>
> Just to add some support for this from a wider range
>
> On 13/02/07, Jim Ottaway <j.ottaway@lse.ac.uk > wrote:
> >
> > 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
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > help-gnu-emacs mailing list
> > help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> > http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-gnu-emacs
> >
>
>

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Re: Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

[sven.bretfeld]

On Tue, Feb 13, 2007 at 10:14:10AM +0000, Jim Ottaway wrote:
> 
> 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.

Wow, I'm glad to have started the thread. It may be worth to further develop
your package. It's definitly something that is missing in the Emacs
world. I don't know how to do it, but maybe it can be hosted on Sourceforge?
> 
> 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].

That's of course a problem. But there are internet sites that list
common QDA programmes, mostly propriatory ones. If an Emacs solution
based on your package can reach the status of a beta-version it could
be promoted via those sites. It could be the only QDA tool with the
label "freeware". Not that I am thinking in terms of gratis software,
but that's how these things usually start. It would also be one of the
very few crossplatform QDA software. I think, it will be
appreciated. That would mean more users for Emacs, more support for
GNU.
> 
> If you want to have a look, you can get it at
> http://www.jeho.org/qda.tar.gz. 

Thank you very much. I have downloaded it while I've written my answer.

Sven

Re: Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

[Jim Ottaway]

> On 13 Feb 2007, sven bretfeld wrote:
[...]
> Wow, I'm glad to have started the thread. It may be worth to further develop
> your package. It's definitly something that is missing in the Emacs
> world. I don't know how to do it, but maybe it can be hosted on Sourceforge?
[...]
> That's of course a problem. But there are internet sites that list
> common QDA programmes, mostly propriatory ones. If an Emacs solution
> based on your package can reach the status of a beta-version it could
> be promoted via those sites. It could be the only QDA tool with the
> label "freeware". Not that I am thinking in terms of gratis software,
> but that's how these things usually start. It would also be one of the
> very few crossplatform QDA software. I think, it will be
> appreciated. That would mean more users for Emacs, more support for
> GNU.
> > 
> > If you want to have a look, you can get it at
> > http://www.jeho.org/qda.tar.gz. 
> 
> Thank you very much. I have downloaded it while I've written my answer.

I was probably a bit rash posting the thing: I have had a couple of
private e-mails saying that it doesn't work, and that it is not clear
how to run the thing. It works for me, but it may depend on my Emacs
version, my Emacs setup idiosyncracies, and because I know what to do
with it. So don't expect too much of what you have downloaded!

Nevertheless, it's very encouraging to see such interest: I'll try to
get it into a workable and understandable state as soon as I can
[probably not for a couple of weeks though, I'm afraid], and I'll post
an announcement about it to comp.emacs.sources.

Regards,

-- 
Jim Ottaway

Re: Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

[Brendan Halpin]

Jim Ottaway <j.ottaway@lse.ac.uk> writes:

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

That looks extremely good. If it were not for the fact that the
intersection of the set of qualitative sociologists and the set of
emacs users is extremely small, it could be very popular. That
said, it could be useful for much more than analysing interview
transcripts. 

Brendan
-- 
Brendan Halpin,  Department of Sociology,  University of Limerick,  Ireland
Tel: w +353-61-213147 f +353-61-202569 h +353-61-338562; Room F2-025 x 3147
mailto:brendan.halpin@ul.ie  http://www.ul.ie/sociology/brendan.halpin.html

Re: Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

[Jim Ottaway]

On 13 Feb 2007, Brendan Halpin wrote:

> Jim Ottaway <j.ottaway@lse.ac.uk> writes:
>
>> If you want to have a look, you can get it at
>> http://www.jeho.org/qda.tar.gz. 
>
> That looks extremely good. If it were not for the fact that the
> intersection of the set of qualitative sociologists and the set of
> emacs users is extremely small, it could be very popular. That
> said, it could be useful for much more than analysing interview
> transcripts. 

Yes, the small N potential users problem was really what kept me from
developing it into something more than for my own personal use.

It hadn't really occurred to me that it might be of broader interest. I
think I'll try to find some time to develop it.


Regards,

-- 
Jim Ottaway

Re: Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

Jim Ottaway wrote:
> On 13 Feb 2007, Brendan Halpin wrote:
> 
>> Jim Ottaway <j.ottaway@lse.ac.uk> writes:
>>
>>> If you want to have a look, you can get it at
>>> http://www.jeho.org/qda.tar.gz. 
>> That looks extremely good. If it were not for the fact that the
>> intersection of the set of qualitative sociologists and the set of
>> emacs users is extremely small, it could be very popular. That
>> said, it could be useful for much more than analysing interview
>> transcripts. 
> 
> Yes, the small N potential users problem was really what kept me from
> developing it into something more than for my own personal use.
> 
> It hadn't really occurred to me that it might be of broader interest. I
> think I'll try to find some time to develop it.



I just downloaded qda and tried to test it. What do I need to do to 
start it? (I read the info file, but it does not tell me the whole story 
I think.)

Re: Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

[sven.bretfeld]

On Tue, Feb 13, 2007 at 01:17:09PM +0100, Lennart Borgman (gmail) wrote:
> 
> I just downloaded qda and tried to test it. What do I need to do to 
> start it? (I read the info file, but it does not tell me the whole story 
> I think.)

Hi Lennart

I tested the package this afternoon. M-x qda RET results in an error
message: "Symbol function is void: loop". But it's possible to start it by typing M-x
load-library RET qda. Before it works you have to put the following to
you .emacs file:

(setq load-path (append load-path
			(list (expand-file-name "~/elisp/qda"))))

Where ~/elisp/qda is the directory where you have installed the
package. I installed it in the system-wide
/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp/qda first time I tried. But, then, I
had to chmod the elc-files to o+r. (I don't know if that was necessary
or just one of the things I tried when I faced problems.)

Create a folder named "qda" in your $HOME. Then try M-x
qda-create-project. Give it a name like "my-project". Then type M-x
qda-view-tree. An empty code-tree appears where you can add new codes
by typing "a", and then "t" for refreshing the tree. I could only add
new codes (nodes) of the first degree. Additional nodes of the 2nd and
3rd degree could be added but are nor displayed when I typed "t"
again.

But the package is stil not usable, since the function
qda-load-project doesn't work at the moment. Also qda-introduce-doc
isn't working. 

That's how far I have come. 

I'm looking forward for a version that works in all environments.

Jim, however I can help you, please tell me. Remember, I'm not an
elisp developer, but I can serve as a test-user whenever you can find
some time to do further work. Oh, by the way, congratulations for your PhD.

Sven 

Re: Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

[Jim Ottaway]

> On 13 Feb 2007, sven bretfeld wrote:
[...]
> Create a folder named "qda" in your $HOME. Then try M-x
> qda-create-project. Give it a name like "my-project". Then type M-x
> qda-view-tree. An empty code-tree appears where you can add new codes
> by typing "a", and then "t" for refreshing the tree. I could only add
> new codes (nodes) of the first degree. Additional nodes of the 2nd and
> 3rd degree could be added but are nor displayed when I typed "t"
> again.
> 
> But the package is stil not usable, since the function
> qda-load-project doesn't work at the moment. Also qda-introduce-doc
> isn't working. 
>
> That's how far I have come. 
> 
> I'm looking forward for a version that works in all environments.

I am embarrassed that it doesn't work: I thought that the main problem
was that it had poor documentation and a difficult user interface. But I
had not noticed that the project setup and document introduction bits
didn't work anymore since I have not created any projects nor added any
documents for a few years. Mostly I've been analysing a lot of interview
data that I had already added.

And there are a few nice developments in Emacs that could be added to
it, such as the tree-widget facility, and Muse's hyperlinking and
publishing. 

> Jim, however I can help you, please tell me. Remember, I'm not an
> elisp developer, but I can serve as a test-user whenever you can find
> some time to do further work.

Thanks, I'll bear that in mind.

> Oh, by the way, congratulations for your PhD.

Thank you! It seems to be harder to find time for Emacs programming
since passing the PhD, though.

Regards,

-- 
Jim Ottaway

Re: Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

[dsoliver]

>
> 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

Re: Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

[Brendan Halpin]

"Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

> Sorry, I have no idea what this is all about, but your description makes me
> think that Icicles tagged regions might help. They are a persistent set of
> named start and end locations, together with buffer names (which can be
> filenames). And you can use completion with them.
> http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/Icicles_-_Multiple_Regions.

That indeed sounds like it could be very useful.

Brendan
-- 
Brendan Halpin,  Department of Sociology,  University of Limerick,  Ireland
Tel: w +353-61-213147 f +353-61-202569 h +353-61-338562; Room F2-025 x 3147
mailto:brendan.halpin@ul.ie  http://www.ul.ie/sociology/brendan.halpin.html

Re: Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

[thorne]

Sven Bretfeld <sven.bretfeld@relwi.unibe.ch> writes:

> 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?

Er, no.  Sorry, but i am wondering, it sounds like what you are
describing is a species of indexing tool.  Is that a fair
characterization?

-- 
þ    theron tlax    þ

Re: Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

[Brendan Halpin]

Sven Bretfeld <sven.bretfeld@relwi.unibe.ch> writes:

> 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 don't do qualitative analysis (my colleagues are keen on NVivo)
but I have gone through a similar thought process (e.g. sitting in
seminars where someone was trying to sell the idea). It struck me
that it would be extremely useful for other purposes too,
particularly large-scale literature reviews.

Lisp alone could get you a long way, if you're comfortable with it.
If all you are doing is applying tags (i.e. an open-ended set of
categories) to spans of text, you need something that stores
structures like '(filename start end tag) [for text in FILENAME
from point START to point END, tag it with TAG]. You could use
completion functions to enter the tag, to remind you of what you've
already used. This assumes the source texts are immutable, of
course, otherwise start and end become unreliable.

It would be reasonably straightforward to write functions to
generate reports (e.g. create a buffer containing every span tagged
"backsliding", with filename and possibly related info). You could
use overlays to highlight tagged spans in files. (Overlays may also
give a mechanism where tagged spans could be resistant to editing,
so the immutability of the source text is no longer required, as
long as the overlays can be translated to the tag-structure and
saved...) You could also define a hotkey in the report buffer which
jumps to the highlighted span in context and vice versa. 

There is possibly a lot more to the workflow that I don't know
about, and there is a certain amount of lisp programming involved,
but it should certainly be possible to get something functional and
useful quite rapidly. 

Regards,

Brendan
-- 

Brendan Halpin,  Department of Sociology,  University of Limerick,  Ireland
Tel: w +353-61-213147 f +353-61-202569 h +353-61-338562; Room F2-025 x 3147
mailto:brendan.halpin@ul.ie  http://www.ul.ie/sociology/brendan.halpin.html

RE: Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

[Drew Adams]

> Lisp alone could get you a long way, if you're comfortable with it.
> If all you are doing is applying tags (i.e. an open-ended set of
> categories) to spans of text, you need something that stores
> structures like '(filename start end tag) [for text in FILENAME
> from point START to point END, tag it with TAG]. You could use
> completion functions to enter the tag, to remind you of what you've
> already used. This assumes the source texts are immutable, of
> course, otherwise start and end become unreliable.

Sorry, I have no idea what this is all about, but your description makes me
think that Icicles tagged regions might help. They are a persistent set of
named start and end locations, together with buffer names (which can be
filenames). And you can use completion with them.
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/Icicles_-_Multiple_Regions.

Re: Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

[sven.bretfeld]

On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 01:48:24PM -0800, Drew Adams wrote:
> > Lisp alone could get you a long way, if you're comfortable with it.
> > If all you are doing is applying tags (i.e. an open-ended set of
> > categories) to spans of text, you need something that stores
> > structures like '(filename start end tag) [for text in FILENAME
> > from point START to point END, tag it with TAG]. You could use
> > completion functions to enter the tag, to remind you of what you've
> > already used. This assumes the source texts are immutable, of
> > course, otherwise start and end become unreliable.
> 
> Sorry, I have no idea what this is all about, but your description makes me
> think that Icicles tagged regions might help. They are a persistent set of
> named start and end locations, together with buffer names (which can be
> filenames). And you can use completion with them.
> http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/Icicles_-_Multiple_Regions.

Thanks to all for your suggestions. Regretably I'm not a
developer. I'm doing hard to learn how to configure my .emacs
file. But I think writing a QDA mode might be a task that could be
welcomed by many people. Every university seems to have hundreds of
people and teams using QDA methods in humanities and social sciences
of different flavours, including medical sociology and
psychology. Propriatory software is very expensive and ties users to a
specific software solution and its upgrades (I had to buy vm-ware
workstation only to use Atlas.ti under GNU/Linux). The only QDA tool
running under GNU is GTAMSAnalyzer which is hardly as powerful as, I
feel, an Emacs solution could be.

Brandon described what has to be done quite well as far as I can
tell. And yes, it could be used for many things apart from QDA. I, for
example, also use(d) Atlas.ti as a kind of "knowledge storehouse" by
making excerpts to every piece of scientific literature I read, coding
them with specific labels. This makes up a system of interrelated
memos similar to the information storage system that enabled the
famous German sociologist Niklas Luhmann to write one thick book per
year (he collected information on paper storing them in an
"algorhythm" that only he himself understood). I think that might be
the large scale literature reviews that you have in mind, Brandon.

I will have a look at Icicles tomorrow. Maybe my skills are sufficient
to produce a rudimentary solution myself. It would be enough to have
the memos of my present project available in Emacs with tagged
regions. I will see.

Sven

Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

[Sven Bretfeld]

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