Org-mode as QDA-Software?

Org-mode as QDA-Software?

[Sven Bretfeld]

Hi all, especially you org developers out there

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).

AFAIK, there is only one piece of QDA software available for Linux,
gTAMS Analyzer, which is quite awkward in my opinion.

I often advocate QDAS to students and PhD students for managing
Discourse Analysis projects, and its always embarrassing to push them to
expensive programs. But I think org-mode is just one step away from
being a powerful QDAS, especially with org-babel, I think. This lack in
the world of free software might be only a small addon-package away. It
would be the first cross-platform solution, and group functionalities
could be implemented via git, CVS or SVN. To my regret, I'm just a
devoted user, in no way a developer.

Is any developer out there who deems this a worthwhile project? Students
all over the world would be grateful (if we manage to make it known via
Google and Wikipedia).

Greetings

Sven

[¹]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualitative_research.
[²]  http://www.atlasti.com/en/.
[³]  http://www.maxqda.com/.

Re: Org-mode as QDA-Software?

[Andrew Stribblehill]

2009/12/18 Sven Bretfeld <sven.bretfeld@gmx.ch>:
> Hi all, especially you org developers out there
>
> 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).
>
> AFAIK, there is only one piece of QDA software available for Linux,
> gTAMS Analyzer, which is quite awkward in my opinion.
>
> I often advocate QDAS to students and PhD students for managing
> Discourse Analysis projects, and its always embarrassing to push them to
> expensive programs. But I think org-mode is just one step away from
> being a powerful QDAS, especially with org-babel, I think. This lack in
> the world of free software might be only a small addon-package away. It
> would be the first cross-platform solution, and group functionalities
> could be implemented via git, CVS or SVN. To my regret, I'm just a
> devoted user, in no way a developer.
>
> Is any developer out there who deems this a worthwhile project? Students
> all over the world would be grateful (if we manage to make it known via
> Google and Wikipedia).
>
> Greetings
>
> Sven
>
> [¹]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualitative_research.
> [²]  http://www.atlasti.com/en/.
> [³]  http://www.maxqda.com/.

Without a clearer understanding of what features you want, I don't
think anyone's going to be able to answer you to your or their
satisfaction.

From skimming the first section of
http://www.maxqda.com/products/functionstab (Data management) it looks
like orgmode already supports most of these requirements. The latter
two, related to weighting paragraphs of text (presumably to mark up
relevance?) are not trivially supported unless you wanted to make them
subsections and assign them Properties.

I've never used this software but the list of features seems very much
a grab-bag of stuff all glommed together into one big product with
little attention paid to the core requirements: maybe some clear
thinking about what the fundamentals of qualitative data analysis
tools are will prove useful.

Re: Org-mode as QDA-Software?

[Henri-Paul Indiogine]

"Sven Bretfeld" <sven.bretfeld@gmx.ch> writes:
> AFAIK, there is only one piece of QDA software available for Linux,
> gTAMS Analyzer, which is quite awkward in my opinion.

RQDA is an R package.  I have used it for a project.  Because it is part of R it is cross-platform, which is a plus.

See: http://rqda.r-forge.r-project.org


Henri-Paul



-- 
Henri-Paul Indiogine
hindiogine@gmail.com

Texas A&M University

http://www.coe.tamu.edu/~enrico

Re: Org-mode as QDA-Software?

[Jason McBrayer]

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.  :(