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Advice on research software
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Posted by Eduardo Mauro
Aug 19, 2013 at 11:04 AM
Should be released within a month.
Posted by Bernhard
Aug 19, 2013 at 11:57 AM
Eduardo Mauro wrote:
Should be released within a month.
Good news, thanks!
Posted by 22111
Aug 20, 2013 at 06:57 PM
I missed the need for quantifying, and this is indeed a very important aspect of the overall task.
I did not try with AS but it seems to me that there, some quantifying at least could be realized, within reports, by adding fields within the reports where other fields or “search hits” are summed up or even are just counted - unfortunately, the help section of AS is rather terrible, and as said, the - very instructive - forum help is gone together with the forum. Also, all this quantifying, especially in combinations = creating tables would need some scripting or use of a relational database?
Anyway, the description of CT6 seems very promising, all the more so since the “source identification data” is there (within the link info). So perhaps the developer will make it available, too, in some way, for example by toggle, instead of the link before each clip.
Of course, this will not resolve the quantification needs problem, so the following hint would apply to AS or CT6 or any other such program.
Consider having two softwares running at the same time, on two screens, or side by side on a large screen. Have AS, CT6 or such in order to edit your data, including formatting, coding, gathering clips in new collections, etc.
Then for any quantifying analysis, export your data into a plain .txt file (1 former paragraph here 1 very long line, but not necessarily), and work on it by an editor like KEdit (look for more details about KEdit within the donationcoder.com site). Especially for this type of analysis “how many #ac in combination with #pt but without #td”, KEdit is one of the best tools there is, since you can go back and forth, meaning you join other codes, you withdraw some, etc., etc. - you just have to write your criteria down on paper in order to not get lost within your “more” and “less” choices, and at every moment, you will know how many such “paragraphs” = lines will meet your criteria combination.
As said, there is nothing that even comes near it for this work, except of course, I assume, specialized software; and of course, all these sub-groups of your data can be stored distinctly.
Of course, the deploy of this tool supposes preselections made within another tool, AS / CT6, that are able to put “source identification data” before each such paragraph / line.
Or, if you can live without wysiwyg formatting (you can toggle the long lines to paragraphs and back, in order to edit vs. analyze), have a very simple macro running that puts the “source data” from line 1 of any “package” before any of the following lines, then deletes that line: I suppose the records / “packages” of your original data are distinguished by a special character, or by two blank lines, paragraphs being separated by just one blank line, or similar. In such an environment, your original data could be “prepared for KEdit” in some 10 minutes.
KEdit is certainly worth a very thorough look (and also, they have plenty of help material for these special commands which make it unique), be it as an add-on to AS or CT6, or as your only tool from now on.
As soon as you got your “source data” into each respective line, it comes quite near what to expect from a database, except for sparing you all the programming / tweaking that would be necessary there.
Posted by Bernhard
Aug 21, 2013 at 07:39 AM
22111 wrote:
>Then for any quantifying analysis, export your data into a plain .txt
>file (1 former paragraph here 1 very long line, but not necessarily),
>and work on it by an editor like KEdit (look for more details about
>KEdit within the donationcoder.com site). Especially for this type of
>analysis “how many #ac in combination with #pt but without #td”, KEdit
>is one of the best tools there is, since you can go back and forth,
>meaning you join other codes, you withdraw some, etc., etc. - you just
>have to write your criteria down on paper in order to not get lost
>within your “more” and “less” choices, and at every moment, you will
>know how many such “paragraphs” = lines will meet your criteria
>combination.
>
<...>
>KEdit is certainly worth a very thorough look (and also, they have
>plenty of help material for these special commands which make it
>unique), be it as an add-on to AS or CT6, or as your only tool from now
>on.
>
But you should be aware that KEdit is costly and on the road to abandonware (http://www.kedit.com/whatsnew.html). Eventually, THE The Hessling Editor (http://hessling-editor.sourceforge.net/) colud be a freeware alternative.
Posted by 22111
Aug 21, 2013 at 11:35 AM
I should perhaps have added
- that these special abilities are not proper to KEdit, but to so-called “Eastern text editors”
- that there is a (an original?) free editor, XEdit
- that the others, KEdit, and THE you mentioned (The Hessling Editor), are probably derivatives of that XEdit
But
- I don’t know those but by name, and it’s supposed there are some differences, though
- for KEdit there is ample material explaining its special functionality
- then, perhaps you could use that KEdit material in order to understand the respective functionality in XEdit and / or THE
- you can (perhaps not legally, but in practice) make ample use of KEdit since trial version just does not allow saving big files, but we are speaking of plain text files here…
- if you really use it on a “professional” basis, you might be delighted by it so much that you end up paying the 149 dollars
- which would never occur if you worked with the above alternatives, so technically, you are not bound to pay for KEdit, but you might pay out of respect for this fine program
Having said this, I think I should add that I just “played around” with KEdit, needing standardized procedures for which I do the scripting once, then have the script do, on different data, exactly the same manipulations.
But your task is very different from mine, you have to analyse data in a way you do not know which way beforehand, meaning you will see, within your analysing process, how to refine (or even switch) your further analysis, meaning your intermediate results will decide upon your further needs at any given moment, and for such “plastic”, not standardized, analysis, I never encountered anything better than KEdit.
Or any of those free alternatives mentioned above, provided they offer exactly the same functionality as KEdit in this respect, or even more.
Anyway, I’m afraid, every such solution will share the same problem as explained above: For “a = 1 or 2 or 3”, you will have to do it the way “a = 1 or a = 2 or a = 3”, neither “a in the range between 1 and 3” nor “a > 0 and < 4”, which is, of course, a big problem if the range is not “1 to 3” but “50 to 200”.
That’s why, in the end, for such tasks, you even could be in need of a third tool, for example Excel (and which perhaps better explains the prices of dedicated software). But then, for some intermediate needs, you could both try tricks like
- macros that will enter “search” strings like “a=1 or a=2…”, and not usings 1, 2, 3 but starting with 10 (or have 01,02,03…): this way you could easily identify ranges of ten
- using the regular expression capabilities of KEdit (or perhaps its free competitors; AS for example does not have such); if you are willing to delve into regex, you will even be able to replace any missing “a in the range from x to y” capability by the corresponding a bigger than regex “a = [...” and the corresponding lesser regex “a=[...”, and this even for decimal numbers
Of course, the alternatives might do this as well, and this way, 1 hour of searching for the correct regex “codings” will perhaps spare you perhaps days of manual work.