Today I attended a data collection + analysis workshop led by UMass Amherst professor Stuart Shulman.\u00a0 The workshop focused on two web-based tools developed by Dr. Shulman \u2013 an old one (CAT) and a new one (Discover Text).<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s a thumbnail sketch of CAT and some of its potential uses.<\/p>\n
Coding Analysis Toolkit (CAT)<\/span><\/p>\n CAT<\/a> is a web-based system into which you can upload text files for team-based qualitative analysis.\u00a0 It is intended primarily for Atlas.ti<\/a> users who are working on collaborative projects involving a number of coders.\u00a0 The idea is that you upload your Atlas.ti HUs (\u201chermeneutic units,\u201d which is just a complicated name for \u201cprojects\u201d) into CAT, and then run reliability tests on your coders\u2019 work.\u00a0 CAT users are probably asking questions like these:<\/p>\n If you do not have Atlas.ti data, but are looking for a platform for team\/collaborative coding, CAT could also be useful to you.\u00a0 The key thing here is that CAT is well suited to quickly coding very large batches of texts that are short and highly consistent.<\/p>\n Let me explain.<\/p>\n In a program like Atlas.ti you highlight and code small bits of text (for example, a word, sentence, paragraph, exchange, etc.) that are contained within a larger piece of text (such as an interview, an interaction transcript, an article or news story, etc.)\u00a0 You are constantly highlighting and \u201ctagging\u201d contextualized data.\u00a0 You are also able to see visual representations of the codes present in whichever file you are working on.<\/p>\n CAT, on the other hand, seeks to do away with the clicks and drags of selecting, highlighting, and tagging data with your keyboard and mouse.\u00a0 Instead, CAT allows you to import broken up (or \u201cdemarcated\u201d) data, which then gets separated into \u201cpages\u201d on the UI.\u00a0 That is, instead of seeing one long interview transcript on the screen, I see just the first paragraph on the UI.\u00a0 In one open field I type in a code (or multiple codes) for that paragraph.\u00a0 Alternately, I can select a code from my list.\u00a0 Once this paragraph is coded, I do a simple click to get to the next paragraph.\u00a0 Again, instead of seeing the whole interview (or article, or transcript, etc.) I just see one piece of it at a time.\u00a0 It\u2019s like flipping through a book in which each \u201cpage\u201d is a small piece of data.<\/p>\n This sort of approach would be well suited to examining archives of Twitter posts, or Facebook status updates, memos, interviews \u2013 any type of texts that are limited in size OR can easily be broken up into smaller pieces, and which have a consistent format.<\/p>\n As you can imagine, this would probably not be the ideal tool for you if you needed or wanted to keep your data embedded in its larger context as you were analyzing it.\u00a0 CAT seems to be less suited to fine-grained analysis than Atlas.ti or other similar programs, but I can certainly see how it would be useful for doing concerted, rapid, first-run group analyses of very large data sets.<\/p>\n Using CAT is free, but you do need to create accounts for yourself as well as your coders.\u00a0 You can also assign the coders on your project various permissions.<\/p>\n For more, see this introduction<\/a> and this overview<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n