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