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

Posted by yooj
Aug 14, 2012 at 05:32 PM

As a lawyer, QDA is appealing to analyze documents and evidence in preparation for witness examinations and legal argument. Transcripts, statements, and audio and video recordings, and images can be excerpted by source, and individual fact, and issue; and then filtered on these fields. Casemap is the standard for this analysis. This thread caused me to look at QDA software as an alternative. I am evaluating, for free, Dedoose, a Java QDA app. Aspects are superior to Casemap. Notably, it is much more visual. Color is used well, and excerpts instantly and can be viewed in clear, coded context. Multi-media support is valuable. Java is less than ideal, but for me, so is Casemap’s native Windows platform, which I run virtualized on OS X, my platform of choice. The deal breaker presently for Dedoose is poor PDF support. Imported PDFs apparently are barely supported. I could not excerpt from standard OCRed scanned PDFs. Instead of importing PDFs, Dedoose users are advised by Dedoose to convert PDFs to RTF or .doc format. Some of the other QDA applications indicate full PDF support. I have not tried them yet.

Devonthink is appealing for case analysis, too. I’ve used it for storage and recall for years. One requirement for expanding its use to replace Casemap is that I have so far been unable to create a script to excerpt from PDFs with a link-back reference to the original PDF and its page number. There is a standard contextual (right click) option for copying a page link, but it’s burdensome to use it for each clipping. There is also a script for annotating a PDF, but it works only for whole PDFs, not excerpts of them. Another awkward limitation is obtaining intersection of tags, or of groups. Smart searches or smart groups permit intersection searches; and the tag view does. Neither is ideal, however. Smart searches are not meant to be and cannot be created rapidly ad hoc. The smart search smart folders create clutter until deleted. And the tag view is awkward to use for intersection searches because it contains tags from the whole database. Finding the group-specific tags which are needed in the sea of database-wide tags, especially when one is under stress such as in a trial, is problematic. Nesting tags does not help because the database view seems to be only flat, even if the tags are nested in Devonthink’s tag/group browser pane. Finally, printing is inadequate. To print multiple files, one must combine the files into one file. I have been unable to select multiple files and then simply issue one print command to print them.