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Babeth Lefur wrote: > > Birrell, > > Please tell me more about atlas/ti. I have been hesitating between NVivo, > NU*dist and Atlas/ti. I am going for the latter for the following reasons: > flexibility, creativity, visual, non-linnear. I am just beginning to work > with it, so how is it for an experienced user? > > Babeth Lefur > Effectivness Initiative > Bernard van Leer Foundation Speaking only briefly, because I am about to go out of town: I had the opportunity to review Atlas vs NUD*IST for an article I wrote. I have not seen NVivo in action. Based on my trials for the review, I chose Atlas when it came time to do my own dissertation, just because it combined "flexibility, creativity, visual, non-linear" features with a very rigorous infrastructure. I could build network diagrams of highly abstract ideas and create my own relationships in those networks, but every idea in those networks was grounded directly or indirectly in quotes from my text. So if I wanted to justify an abstract idea, I could just ask Atlas to gather the quotes for it, and it would work its way down the ladder of abstraction and give them to me. I found Atlas much more flexible in its coding than NUD*IST. I was able to code with just a quick swipe of the mouse and a click on the sort of coding I wanted to use. It also had a very excellent search facility built in (as does NUD*IST). The Atlas.ti email list is helpful and quick to respond, serving as an informal but very effective support department. Thomas Muhr (creator of Atlas) takes part in it as well, with humor and skill. Software updates, called service packs, are free and frequent; they offer significant improvments between releases of the major revisions. Atlas can be used to code graphics, audio and video, though I did not use those features and do not know much about them. But the features I did use served me well in analyzing eight hundred pages of data. Hope this is useful, Birrell Walsh MicroTimes %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%