Progam with QDA Qualitative Data Analysis features? Coding/tagging blocks of text?

Posted by Fredy
Aug 3, 2012 at 09:37 PM

Carrot, you say you will probably use such a program for years. Let’s suppose after your PhD you’ll be well paid. You think 1-2 Benjamins now and 6 others then will be too much money, for such “overpriced” sw, and you say many, many others think as you do. Some weeks ago, in the UltraRecall forum I (as schferk) explained in depth WHY sw developers have lost all interest in refining their babies. People who think like you are the culprits, I fear, for such a development to extreme poverty in functionality of available sw, and, as I explained there also, the cloud crowd will not be better off neither, all to the contrary.

Daly, did it ever occur to you what the original idea behind a citation function in a forum sw was? Just a hint: SELECT BITS to comment on those bits.

ConnectedText, it’s a pleasure to see you’re considered here, lately, as the Swiss pocket knife to any text processing problem whatsoever; it’s heart-warming to see one developer flourish at least, even if it’s for the wrong reasons. At soon as you’ll be able to prepare my coffee and do my laundry, let me know, I’ll happily buy.

Carrot, if you really want to become independent of your proprietary “format”, may it for bucks or for other factors: Consider using a programmable editor. 1 line 1 paragraph. Each line starting with at least one code “super-paragraph” (this can be automatted), more codes at libitum, here or at the end of lines or anywhere within, just use dollar, pound, whatever leading signs.

Many such editors can sort lines by block content, i.e. chars x to y of these lines (hence the utility to carefully design your codes(‘lengths, incl. blank codes)), not just by their start chars. Many such editors can filter lines by multiple criteria (= codes = “fields” with specific content); regex goes without saying. They’re all many years old - so what, except for Unicode, perhaps?

There are some special editors like KEdit that seem to facilitate such filtering at first sight - I’m not advocating these traps, though.

You can buy for cheap such editors, or even “steal” them. All that’s needed for everything you’ll ever need here is perhaps one day of learning the corresponding syntax, incl. some statistical functionality that might be needed.

Then, with your PhD, you’ll probably work within a corporation that buys some sw, fortunately. Corporations buy sw, individuals by iPads. (800$ every years’s nothing for such lifestyle hardware, but beware of applics costing 5$ - they must be 1,50 or they will be unacceptable). That’s why in many years here, nothing really new here, and nothing will come.