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