Advice on research software

Posted by 22111
Aug 17, 2013 at 05:40 PM

I don’t see how such a task could be done with the Adobe product. I also jumped 30 cm up when reading “Access, a free-form database”. Dr Andus could easily give you 2, 3 or 4 names of dedicated software (CT not being one of them as far as I know, but might “do” it, Dr Andus knows it thoroughly, so he only could tell), but those are in the range of 1,000 to 3,000 dollars / euro, except for students (which have the problem that in most cases, their cheap versions do expire rather soon, it’s not as with MS and such).

Technically, a relational database can do it, but it was on purpose I put those examples here: The problem with relational databases is that with such a task, they don’t work well but when you atomize your texts into paragraphs, which means you will lose the context: With “1 paragraph = 1 record”, it’s quite another thing than what most people really need there, and which is “1 paper = 1 record, but then, be able to freely gather paragraphs from everywhere, not losing their respective source references”.

I don’t know the defunct free-form database mentioned above, but I know askSam, and I’m 100 % POSITIVE that it can do it, per so-called “reports”, but only if you invest some time into the re-arrangement of your coding (not: coded) data, but with the “global replace” function, before entering the data into AS, or even within AS, this should be possible.

Since I pretend it’s possible, I also need to say that yes, you would have to “code” every paragraph as a (multiply-occuring) “field”, and then, the “header info” as another (unique) field, and then, with proper coding, gathering all relevant paragraphs from anywhere, together with their respective “headers”, is possible.

Records would look like this:

#HeaderFieldIdentifier[respective data of the header; could be divided up into several fields, e.g. all in one line, or in several of them
Attention: In order to be able to change / add fields in AS afterwards, have (even empty dummy) fields in such lines; it’s (except for external scripting) the only way to add fields between other fields, example: field1[askjfsdfas] dummyfield2[(left empty)] field3[asdfklhaskflhsafkhsd]
Now you can insert a field “2a” by replacing
] field3[
by
] newfield2a[] field3[

This is extremely primitive, but at least it works, and whenever AS is the only program that’s able to execute your task, such headaches suddenly become acceptable.

Further down, the “real content” of each record:

t[text text text, even for several lines
]

t[again text, text]

t[again text, text…
text…]

This is ugly, but it is the only way of doing it as far as I know, and this way, AS is able to do it, by your taking advantage of AS’ ability to process identically-named “fields”, in its searches, and in its “reports”.

AS has been moribund for years, but is in current development, and, depending on the size of your material, you would need the “prof.” version, e.g. for 5,000 records with something between 3 and 100 paragraphs, but perhaps you will just have 500 such records, and even for 1,000 records, the “standard” version will amply suffice (the only difference being the lacking search index here, but any results are identical, just take a little more time then); also, AS is regularly on bitsdujour, so buying the “standard” version full price, then buying the “prof.” version on bits some other day should be a viable policy.

This is a cumbersome but working solution for this task.

The only alternative I know of is scripting, meaning you put your data into separate files, or all your data in one text file, and then you put together macros that work on this stuff.

Of course, this requires some scripting ability, and worse, you will have very long lines, not paragraphs, and no way to have formatting like bolding and such.

That’s why you should spend some hours with trialling AS, with your imported data.

As for coding the data there, for each paragraph = “t[” “field”, this could be done in the form “#28”, “#ac”, etc, as part of the first line of these paragraphs / multi-line “fields” and then searching for those “near” each other whenever you need them in combination.

Many people continue to work with AS each day, in spite of numerous problems with that software (do lots of backups; don’t search for a forum anymore; perfect search is by command line only, but the respective commands can always be found in the web) - the above use is one of those where AS excels or even is unique.