Advice on research software

Posted by 22111
Aug 17, 2013 at 10:52 PM

Above it’s “But it appears more “natural” to me to have some “paper” as a unit/record, then break up its elements when needed, THAN (not: then) breaking up such “papers” to begin with, and then recombining…”, of course.

With respect to AS, I forgot to mention that it even could be possible to have numeric values / value ranges in paragraphs to search for / according to which you select a given paragraph or not, but I’m not sure of this: This works for records, of course, but not necessarily for paragraphs, meaning coding in the form #28, @abc WITHIN a paragraph = field is without problems in AS, but putting that coding info into an extra field there would then, within the report, select that field, not the corresponding “text” field - it goes without saying that within a relational database, this would be possible, though (btw, in MyInfo, with attributes, it is not even possible on the record level, let alone any paragraph level).

In a software like AS, though, you could at least have codes like #ac1, #ac2 and #ac3, then “search for” / select all paragraphs with “#ac2 or #ac3 or °ac4” - this is all far from perfect (meaning it will probably be impossible to get paragraphs “where #ac>1 and #ac<5”), that’s why I do such things with scripting, but there is a lot of work involved, as would possibly be in tweaking a relational database the way you would need it.

In any case, it seems advisable to get some software where at least it is possible “to do it” “by software”, even if it’s in some cumbersome way, than to adopt a solution where you will have to do much of this work manually.

And also, it’s of little interest to have some software available that theoretically will do it in some perfect way after proper scripting/programming, when in the end this perfect tweaking of your tool is lacking, for lack of time to invest into this “additional” task.

I’ve often used AS as a “quick-n-dirty” solution: cumbersome, not offering everything I wanted, but readily available, and quick results… way above what you would have got with classic outliners.

A last word: It goes without saying that tagging presents the same problems:
- no numeric ranges (but “tagk2 OR tagk3 OR tagk4” at least, and often that is sufficient)
- and tagging of records, not of specific paragraphs (but is there any outliner where you tag those? but:)
- when there is, just those paragraphs, but without their respective “source” info

Of course, if the project is “worth” it, there’s always the possibility to pay somebody to code for the respective needs, within a relational database, e.g. per some of those portals connecting western customers and coders world-wide (Russia, India, China…)

But whenever AS does the job, it’s the solution to be preferred, just my opinion.