How would you do the following and with what tools?

I have a hierarchical list (organised under headings in ConnectedText) with about 400 items, with about 3000 words. They are organised under 9 main headings (groups), but they have lots of sub-headings. I need to now analyse this list to group common themes that cut across the categories.

That itself would be easy enough to do with an outliner (CT's own, Bonsai etc.), where I could just move similar items together under the same branch. However, I do not want to lose the membership of any item to the original 9 categories, which would be lost with this outliner method.

There seem to be two solutions to this. 1) Either I should somehow label each item with the 9 categories, or 2) organise this list in a table (as a matrix) where the 9 categories are the columns.

I have just realised as I was typing this that Bonsai does have keywords, so I will try that next. However, I'm wondering if there is a clever way of doing this with namesakes in BrainStorm for instance (which I'm still just learning).

I have tried the matrix method with a Word table and in TreeSheets, but the former somehow felt too cumbersome, while the latter I just don't know well enough.

The challenge with BrainStorm is that I don't want to immediately hide away all the sub-levels, because I need to keep evaluating the analytical possibilities, to develop new categories as I go along. I'm trying to both organise the list and evaluate it at the same time, in order to make sense of it as a coherent document (we're talking about the final findings of my PhD research).

I see that by adding "CASE STUDY" above each of the 9 case study headings and highlighting it in yellow, BrainStorm turned it into a namesake, which allows me to navigate the document more easily. I wonder how one can use namesakes as a category label, so in the end I can preserve both the original 9 categories and develop several new ones, with the intersected text (items) being easily identifiable.

Any advice would be appreciated.

I should maybe add that the purpose of the analysis is 1) to reduce the findings to a single thesis statement (abstraction), and 2) organise them into related themes and a coherent narrative that would constitute the structure of an outline for 3 chapters.

So the organisation (outline) of the 3 chapters is almost a 3rd dimension to the organising of this material (the other 2 being the inherent themes and the 9 case study categories).

Sounds like I'd almost need a 3-D tool for this... Actually Storybook allows for multiple intersecting plot lines, though I'm not sure how handy it would be as an analytical tool to organise a long list like this.

I've also tried Noteliner's table feature, but for some reason the table/matrix solution is not appealing to me, it's not helping with the mental part of analysis. Somehow moving things around in an outline structure seem easier for following the logical thread.

Dr Andus wrote:

I should maybe add that the purpose of the analysis is 1) to reduce the findings to a
single thesis statement (abstraction), and 2) organise them into related themes and
a coherent narrative that would constitute the structure of an outline for 3
chapters.

So the organisation (outline) of the 3 chapters is almost a 3rd dimension
to the organising of this material (the other 2 being the inherent themes and the 9 case
study categories).

Sounds like I'd almost need a 3-D tool for this...

To answer my own question, it seems like Bonsai may allow me to do this after all, as besides the outline (where I can organise the inherent themes into a tree structure) I can enable 2 columns for the other 2 dimensions: categories for the 9 case studies (max. 15 allowed), and (looks like unlimited) keywords for membership in a particular chapter outline.

Interesting case. If you were on a Mac, I'd say Tinderbox would handle this pretty easily. Do you use Scrivener for Windows? If so, you might find the Binder vs. Collections views useful for this exercise.

Steve Z.

Dr. Andus:

The king of this type of analysis is ECCO (was Agenda but that is long ago - although it still runs). ECCO still has a fairly active following and a gentlemen named Slangmesh has built software around ECCO that provides significantly enhanced functionality. There are places where ECCO is still available and with the other tools would serve you very well.

Charles

Sorry - spelled the gentleman's name wrong. It is "slangmgh". Also the material can be found on the ECCO Pro Yahoo group.

Charles

CRC wrote:

The king of this type of analysis is ECCO

This was my first thought as well. Given that Ecco was initially designed in 1993, I sometimes feel that we have given up some ground in software development as we have progressed in other areas. Some of the features that I took for granted in Ecco are nowhere to be found in many modern day programs. Good legacy software is so hard to leave behind. Good luck with your analysis.

--Ken

Ken wrote:

Good legacy software is so hard to leave behind.

Agreed, but, aside from the rather dated interface (which you can customize to some extent), slangmgh has done an incredible job of continuing to enhance the function and provide a modern level of capability. Doubly remarkable in that it was done without any way to change the the product itself.

Charles

Thank you for all the suggestions. ECCO does sound intriguing, I'll check it out at one point. As I had to move quickly, I've decided to use Natara Bonsai in the end.

It turned out to be very easy to assign categories and keywords to a large list of items, and the key is that these get preserved when you copy and paste them elsewhere in the outline, allowing for rearrangement but also a degree of traceability as to where the items came from. Moreover, keywords themselves can have their own categories, which is an extra layer of organisation.