Homepage Project

Textcoding -- A tool for qualitative text analysis

Description

textcoding.el assists users in doing qualitative text analysis by providing a mechanism to attach structured notes to a text. These structured notes are grouped in categories -- i.e. text codes --, which can be visualised by the use of different highlighting colours and text marks. These notes are saved as file properties independently from the text. These notes can be summarised or exported (e.g. as tab separated file).

Caveat: textcoding.el is still experimental, i.e. it hasn't been tested in a significant real world project yet. See also CompEmacsFileproperties.

Installation

Put (require 'textcoding) (textcoding-install) into your user init file. `textcoding-install' installs all the required packages and all hooks necessary. It also loads `textcoding-autoloades-file'.

Starting a new project

When coding a text, you should first define a project -- otherwise a global project definition will be used. This is done by the `textcoding-project-define' macro. An example use would be: 

	(textcoding-project-define
	   textcoding-test-project
	   "~/.xemacs/textcoding-testproj.el"
	   (textcoding-proj-add-categories '("A" "B" "C"))
	   (textcoding-proj-add-faces '(("^A" blue) ("^B" green)))
	   (textcoding-proj-add-templates '((:project "Class" "Note")
					    ("A" "Colour" "Note")
					    ("B" "Height" "Note")))))

Put something like this into a file of its own -- say "~/Etc/TC/test.el". The project data of this example is saved in "~/.xemacs/textcoding-testproj.el". If you add new categories during coding, these will be recorded in this data file.

When evaluating or compiling this macro an autoload definition will be saved in `textcoding-autoloades-file'. After putting something like (following this example) "mode:textcoding-test-project" into your file's local variable section, the project definition in "~/Etc/TC/test.el" will be automatically loaded when opening the text file.

Textcoded regions are implemented as remarks -- see there for an explanation of how to edit, move, or delete them.

Important commands

`textcoding-code'
Code the selected region.
`textcoding-summarise'
Summarise all (or those of CATEGORIES) coded passages in the current buffer -- see also `textcoding-summarise-as-sexp' and `textcoding-summarise-as-tab-separated'.
`textcoding-remake-faces'
Remake coded text's faces according to current settings.

Important functions and macros

`textcoding-project-define'
Define a new textcoding project. There are several functions that might be useful in this respect: `textcoding-proj-add-categories', `textcoding-proj-add-faces', `textcoding-proj-add-templates'.

Important variables and faces

`textcoding-class'
The general textcoding project definition.
`textcoding-project-file'
The general data file.
`textcoding-autoloades-file'
Autoloads.
`textcoding-face'
Standard textcoding face.

Known Problems

Download

Requirements: tellib, remarks, file properties

0.3: textcoding.el.gz

Version history

v0.3
Initial release (tested with XEmacs)


(c) 2003 Thomas Link (last updated Mar 20 2003) home top