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Advice on research software
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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.
Posted by Armin
Aug 18, 2013 at 02:27 PM
Wayne K wrote:
>There is a huge amount of source material available on this topic. I’d
>like to create a database that will allow me to filter and sort the
>material in different ways. Text will be broken up into short sections
>so they can be easily re-arranged. Each text segment will have the
>usual basic fields (tags) such as author, title, date, etc. Each text
>segment could be assigned to dozens of topic fields.
Sounds like the work I do. I collect huge amounts of text data from Web, Books, and Documents etc.
For years now, I mainly use Zoot Software for this kind of text analysis, filtering and sorting. Zoot includes anything, what I need (tags, built-in-fields, user-created fields, folders for smart filtering etc.). I did not find any better text database tool so far. By the way, Zoot can handle not only text, but also images.
22111 wrote:
>Btw, there is a German bibliographic software, Citavi,
I use Citavi, too. Citavi has been developed as a reference manager for organising academic research literature and keeping track of your quotations. But in the meantime, Citavi becomes also an idea manager and an outliner for organising your own ideas as well as your quotation pieces. Because of its structure as a reference manager, I use Citavi only for quotations and small info-snippets, not for huge text storage and organisation. For text filtering and sorting there is Zoot.
Just my experience
Best regards
Armin
Posted by Armin
Aug 18, 2013 at 03:40 PM
22111 wrote:
We know there’s dedicated software for it, and we know it’s expensive.
>Since you post here, let’s assume you don’t want such a solution.
22111 wrote:
>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).
You mean software for qualitative data analysis (QDA-Software)? Examples of this kind of software are MAXQDA and ATLAS.ti
Indeed, they are really really expensive. I had the chance to test MAXQDA in university for some time and it is made for qualitative academic research: analysing interviews (transcriptions) or documents (now even videos or images). For text analysis, their focus is on coding words or paragraphs as 22111 illustrated above. QDA-Software let you organise and categorize your data according to your own code preferences.
Although Zoot is by no means QDA software, you can do quite a lot of qualitative text analysis with Zoot, too. Of course, Zoot lacks special features like visualization, presentation or quantitative analysis of your coding results. However, the price of Zoot, which has a lot more features, is very small, when you see the prices of MAXQDA or ATLAS.ti.
Best regards
Armin
Posted by Dr Andus
Aug 18, 2013 at 08:53 PM
22111 wrote:
CT appears very interesting, albeit I remind the (possibly needed)
>functionality of not only gathering paragraphs, but together with their
>respective “source info” (be that in a special first paragraph of that
>record or elsewhere).
I’m not sure what the final implementation of this feature is going to be, but at least in CT v.6 beta you can do a query for a given “code” (text with which passages have been marked up), which then gathers all the marked-up passages (e.g. in a new document).
Above each gathered passage there would be a hyperlink saying [Edit], and if you click on that, you are taken back to the source document of that particular passage. If you hover over the link with the mouse, the status bar does tell you the name of the source document before clicking.
Posted by Bernhard
Aug 19, 2013 at 09:06 AM
Dr Andus wrote:
22111 wrote:
>I’m not sure what the final implementation of this feature is going to
>be, but at least in CT v.6 beta
It may be OT but is there any news about CT v6? Development started last year in July and there is only a beta forum with no information about a planned publishing date. I don’t want to buy an (possibly soon outdated) upgrade to v5.