Select a web-based QDA software to sync to from Open Ethnographer

Workspaces Software (SSNA)
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Open Ethnographer will only have simple analysis features in the 1.0 version in 2015-02. Analysis will instead happen in an external QDA tool, similar to how we did it for Spot the Future. This task is to find the best-fitting QDA tool for this. Requirements:

  • free and open source software
  • web-based
  • providing multiple user account, each with a different workspace (so, allowing each user to work on a separate set of texts and codings)
  • being an overall good QDA tool for ethnographers

There is already a list of candidate QDA tools, and other candidates and their evaluation can simply be added to that wiki. @Matthias’ current favorite from a tech point of view is CATMA, so it would be great if @Inga_Popovaite could test that first (there is an online demo).

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Web based CAQDAS

CATMA is the best by far. It is fairly easy to use, it allows to do a substantial text analysis with existing tags, it allows to create more tags-as-you-go if needed and group (categorize) them.

CAT is basically a platform which main purpose is to allow several people to work on the same project. However, apart from comparing different coding sets, and validating them, it does not offer any other analysis options. Not useful for us at all.

libreqda - demo does not work, does not have any English version. So far it seems that it needs to be downloaded from github in order to play with it, so does not qualify as web-based tool.

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Great, so this is decided

Thanks for looking into this, Inga. I’m quite happy that CATMA is a useful tool for ethnographers, since it’s also a nice one from a tech perspective. So we can consider this decided and just use CATMA for exports and syncing. Not much to be gained from looking around further …

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Change proposal

I explored CATMA in detail today to see how Open Ethnographer’s concept map to the concepts there for exporting. And I found that I kinda hate CATMA now :smiley: See the reasons.

@Inga_Popovaite, what do you think of these reasons and the idea to export  to RQDA instead?

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Reopening

(forgot that above)

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Re-closing

Exporting to RQDA is implemented now, so the decision-making is implicitly done as well …