TheBrain vs ConnectedText

Posted by Dr Andus
Mar 6, 2015 at 12:10 AM

Jon Polish wrote:
I have a big project to tackle which will involve analysis and
>understanding complex regulations from many government agencies
>governing health care. Some of the sources are quite lengthy though. While I
>currently do not make extensive use of notes, I think I will have to
>capture the regulations as notes.
> >On the other hand, there is ConnectedText. I purchased the latest
>version and would have to learn how best to use it. Would this be a better option?

I have a bit more time, so here are a few more thoughts on this. I can’t comment on TheBrain, but the best way to learn CT is to have a specific problem to solve, which then forces one to figure out some of its intricacies in a live scenario, and the CT forum users can also offer specific help.

There are a number of ways in CT to go about analysing a set of long and complex pieces of texts.

Importing the texts as they are already offers the user the options to run a number of different searches (e.g. incremental search within a text, or global searches across all texts), which is one way to start the analysis.

There are various options to annotate each text. If there aren’t any yet, one can add up to six levels of headings to sub-sections within the text, which allows one to reverse-outline an existing text and then view that outline in the Table of Contents pane.

The next option is to add Categories to each text to label (tag) them, which then creates a grouping of texts that can be navigated via the Categories pane. (In fact searches also create groupings, viewable in the Search pane). Categories can have sub-categories and be viewed as a hierarchical tree in the Categories pane.

Then it’s possible to add another layer of annotation by adding attributes/properties to each piece of text. They are a bit like categories but allow for a wider range of queries to build special reports (as lists or tables) or an “infobox” with a summary of the key parameters of the text at the top.

Then there is the possibility to annotate passages within a text with keywords called Named Blocks. This then allows you to extract passages with the same keyword across various texts and gather them into a separate document. This is CT’s QDA (qualitative data analysis) feature.

Finally, there is the technology of hyperlinks, which is what a wiki is really about. So by way of analysis you can create links from one document to another (or to a section of that document). Then the linked documents can be viewed as a network in the Navigator window. It is also possible to insert a command into each text that produces a graph of its links to other texts (thus emulating TheBrain a bit).

All this linking and annotating becomes even more useful if you decide to chop up the large texts into smaller chunks. This chunking in itself is a form of analysis and sense making. Then the Navigator can become more useful for visualising the various relationships, and the categories and attributes/properties, as well as the searches, can result in more meaningful groupings.

You can of course also use font and background colour highlighting for marking up passages. It is also possible to add different icons to individual topics (as another layer of annotation) and then filter them accordingly.

If there are important dates associated with your texts, then you might want to include them in the special date topics, so they can be navigated via a calendar and organised chronologically.

It’s possible to have multiple view windows open, to compare different sections of the same document or different documents.

Finally, the Outline pane allows one to create ad hoc hierarchical lists of the various documents (or passages, if you break them up), e.g. to keep track of them, or put them in a different order than they are in the Topic list pane, or to mark them out as a to-do list.

There is also the functionality of inclusions, which allow you to gather different sections from various documents and include them in another document, to be able to view them together.