At 05:09 PM 6/19/98 +0200, you wrote:
>Dear Harald,
>
>I am not interested in word or string searching in the text, the kind of
>thing that 'classical' content analysis methods would do. My objective is
>to trace and analyse features of the context in which the text (or
>transcribed oral speech) is produced by means of examining the structural
>or semantic features of the discourse. These may be interpretive frames,
>themes, semantic macrostructures (see Van Dijk), or simply reference to a
>social relationship or an encounter, real or imaginary
[snip]
>I hope now I have given you a clear idea of what I want to achieve. Thus, i
>can build a coding scheme in which I insert the whatever coding categories
>I have chosen to examine (e.g. frames, themes, pairs of actors, types of
>relationships etc.) and code my raw text.
[snip]
>.................................Is buying a new software worth the money,
>time and effort investment???
Well, people do make do with much more fundamental tools. I once had
a look at the data from a behavioral study of manatees trying to discern
sociological patterns in their mutual orientations which was presented
in a spreadsheet format, but with very many long textual annotations.
I've often thought that such records would be more appropriately
expressed in a QDA tool. In fact, one of my hobbies is looking at
bioacoustic records and if I don't get Atlas-TI or something similar
for reasons of work, I may get it for the hobby, so I can exploit
their advertised ability to annotate images and such as well as text.
>I forgot to say that usually I am involved with not too large sets of data:
>e.g. 35 interviews of 10 pages each or 40 newspaper articles of varying
>lengths etc.
>Thus, the DBMS software allows me to systematise my material, code in and
>retrieve whenever I want the segments that I find revealing and/or relevant
>for my hypothesis.
The manatee study had something like 1300 different observations.
[snip]
___________________________________________________________
Jan Theodore Galkowski, Cornell Information Technologies
[log in to unmask], 607-255-5486, Room 132
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http://www.hotwired.com/members/profile/algebraist/
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Also 500-446-2770, or [log in to unmask]
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