Dr Andus
6/28/2012 11:24 am
Cassius wrote:
Primarily it is the subjective judgement of the user, although usually the user is guided by a theory he or she had chosen that guides the attention and recognition of categories. These software work like this:
1. I'm reading a long document (e.g. a transcript of a 2-hr interview).
2. As I read, I highlight sections of text that contain interesting information or answers to my research question and mark them by giving them a "code" (a category that describes them).
3. The software aggregates all the quotes with the same "code" into their own separate documents, which can be further analysed.
So these software are in a way for aggregating and organising quotes. The purpose is to discover new patterns in the material, the existence of new entities (categories) or new relationships between entities.
Interesting. Do these applications try to do it all automatically, or is the user
deeply involved in determining the categories and judging what belongs in a category
and what does not? I expect that a fair amount of judgment and intuition would be
involved because much of the analysis often would include a fair amount of
subjectivity.
Primarily it is the subjective judgement of the user, although usually the user is guided by a theory he or she had chosen that guides the attention and recognition of categories. These software work like this:
1. I'm reading a long document (e.g. a transcript of a 2-hr interview).
2. As I read, I highlight sections of text that contain interesting information or answers to my research question and mark them by giving them a "code" (a category that describes them).
3. The software aggregates all the quotes with the same "code" into their own separate documents, which can be further analysed.
So these software are in a way for aggregating and organising quotes. The purpose is to discover new patterns in the material, the existence of new entities (categories) or new relationships between entities.