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

Posted by Peter
Aug 15, 2012 at 06:51 AM

Thank you for this sobering review yooj. Very helpful!

I am not a lawyer and was unaware of both Casemap and Dedoose. They both sound interesting but I note the issues you raise. I just had a quick look Dedoose. Another drawback is that it is cloud-based which is a problem (for me) when working with sensitive information. This goes against the ethical review guidelines that I must follow for some of my work.

I recognize your frustration with PDF incorporation. Atlas.ti finally managed to get this working about a year ago. However I find that it generally slows with bigger projects. I also find A7 a disappointing upgrade, nothing really new over A6 and clumsy on the whole, now that I’ve switched to a Mac. I’m curious of anyone has comparative experience with other QDA software.

Do you know Mindjet’s program? I think it’s called Mind Manager. I don’t know it yet but it looks like a mind mapper on steroids that might have something to offer above and beyond basic mind mapping.

Your review of DT is also helpful, especially since I am just starting to learn it. I’ve tried to find some real-world screencasts of how people use it but so far I’ve only found one (from 2009): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH2L6WSA0UY. If you felt so inclined to upload a screencast of your use of DT I would certainly be interested! An easy free app to create screencasts is Jing. (I’ve proposed this now to a few people but so far no one has bitten!)

I am also interesting in finding better ways to annotate/tag PDFs. I have yet to explore Sente - DT or other such combinations. BibDesk might also have something to offer:
http://www.organognosi.com/category/bibdesk/. Here is a screencast of someone using Bibdesk and Skim together (both free apps) for annotation: http://jenniferclaro.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/a-simple-academic-workflow/. It looks pretty slick but BibDesk is designed to work with LaTeX apparently, which I know nothing about. I’m not sure how much of an issue this posses when working with Word, Scrivener, for instance.