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You might want to look for "web scrapers" or, if there is an RSS feed, a feed catcher option. I would not try to code whole threads, but you could experiment with whole posts, whole comments or paragraphs in posts and comments. If you get your data collected in plain text format, you would be able to code very efficiently using CAT: http://www.qdap.pitt.edu/cat.htm ~Stu -----Original Message----- From: qual-software [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of [log in to unmask] Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2007 9:05 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Retrieving forum discussions Do you know of ways to collect information from web discussion boards, to be later analysed using suitable qual-software? If I wished to collect a lot of messages or everything from a single discussion system, I would probably program some kind of spider/harvester to collect the info automatically. If the idea is to collect info from many different forums while browsing the net, maybe something like google notebook (http://www.google.com/notebook/ ) or clipmarks ( http://www.clipmarks.com/ ) or some orher, perhaps self-made ajax/ browser plugin type of gizmo could do the trick. Or maybe simply just some copy-paste -scheme would be suffficient for many purposes. Any other ideas? How about clues for analysing the discussions? In atlas/ti -terms: what do you think would be the "primary document"? One posting, or a thread? Or is there some special tricks / programs for just this type of data? Google notebooks seems to offer tools for "coding on the fly". -Timo Harmo Computing Coordinator, Fac of Soc Sci, U of Helsinki. Tel 358 09 191 24915