Dear qualitative researchers,
there has been some mentioning of "rich text", "rich data" even "rich
qualitative data" recently and I am not quite sure if there is consent
about these terms.
>From my point of view richness of data does only make sense when it
expresses the content related characteristics of the data. Although
formatted text looks (not always) better than "poor" ASCII/ANSI it is not
what a researcher would call "rich", even if the special text control
Windows programmer's use frequently is named: RichEdit control.
We are talking about data representation. Let me show two examples for a
poor and a richer representation of a piece of interview data - both
written in ASCII, by the way...
The "poor" one (A):
I.: Ja.
B.: Wars doch eigentlich, ja da wars doch
glaub ich erst ein oder zwei Tage, oder
vielleicht einen Tag.
An obviously richer representation (B):
<Trans version="1" trans_method="LING22" version_date="990120"
audio_filename="au.wav" xml:lang="DE">
<Speakers>
<Speaker id="I" name="Interviewer"/>
<Speaker id="S" name="Herr Schultz" dialect="bavarian"/>
</Speakers>
<Turn speaker="I" tape_pos="2010">
Ja.
</Turn>
<Turn speaker="S" tape_pos="2314">
Wars doch eigentlich, ja da wars doch
glaub ich erst ein oder zwei Tage, oder
vielleicht einen Tag.
</Turn>
</Trans>
The differences are manifold:
A is much shorter than B.
A does not contain the amount of information as B
B does not only display contents, but it DESCRIBES its contents at the same
time, it contains rich (!) meta-information which can be exploited by both
human readers and machines!
The second - richer - example is coded in XML - the eXtensible Markup
Language, recently termed "ASCII of the future". Here lies a chance for
incredibly rich data representations and intelligent display and
processing. With XML you can write your data richly and interchangeable
across systems, hardware, software, domains and methods impossible with a
proprietary format like RTF.
XML - I would suspect - is the most powerful concept for data processing in
any field struggling for rich representations and for exchange capabilities
since the invention of the Internet. Before I get carried away, visit my
XML web page at: http://www.atlasti.de/xml
This page is still under construction but might give you a first idea (if
you haven't already) of what we are currently cooking at Scientific
Software Development.
Although the XMLized interview fragment above seems a bit verbose compared
to the unstructured poor version, it is nothing compared to the verbosity
(= rich?) of the same text exported as RTF from Word. Below are the last
few hundred characters of a threethousand bytes RTF doc (well, to be fair,
if you dont use Word it can be smaller) representing the same interview
text fragment. The interviewer and interviewee characters were set to bold,
the text was set to italics and indented, nothing else - and still no
explicit representation of content:
..........
\pnlcltr\pnstart1\pnindent720\pnhang{\pntxtb (}{\pntxta
)}}{\*\pnseclvl7\pnlcrm\pnstart1\pnindent720\pnhang{\pntxtb (}{\pntxta
)}}{\*\pnseclvl8\pnlcltr\pnstart1\pnindent720\pnhang{\pntxtb (}{\pntxta
)}}{\*\pnseclvl9\pnlcrm\pnstart1\pnindent720\pnhang
{\pntxtb (}{\pntxta )}}\pard\plain \s16\nowidctlpar\widctlpar\adjustright
\f2\fs20\lang1031 {\b
\par I.:}{\tab }{Ja.}{
\par }{
\par }\pard \s16\fi-708\li708\nowidctlpar\widctlpar\adjustright {\b
B.:}{\tab }{\i Wars doch eigentlich, ja da wars doch glaub ich erst ein
oder zwei }{\i T}{\i age, oder vielleicht einen Tag.}{
\par }}
If you have Internet Explorer 5.0 take a look at the samples on our xml
page. One of the samples creates "rich but dirty" RTF output from rich but
clean contents.
Any comments welcome
- Thomas
___________________________________________________________________
Dipl.-Psych. Dipl.-Inform. Thomas Muhr
Scientific Software Development - Internet: http://www.atlasti.de
Mailing list (join, leave, etc): www.atlasti.de/joinlist.html
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