Re: [emacs-humanities] Thematic analysis in Emacs

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

Hello Divya

Thank you for your reply.

> On Oct 20, 2024, at 8:04, Divya Ranjan <divya@subvertising.org> wrote:
> 
> Jean-Christophe Helary via Emacs-humanities <emacs-humanities@gnu.org> writes:
> 
>> I’m (at last) entering a PhD course this month and have started working on 
>> data from my MA.
>> 
>> I have about 30 hours of interviews (14 people, in Japanese) and I’m 
>> wondering what’s the best way to do thematic analysis in Emacs.
>> 
>> I’ve first started with a spreadsheet in LibreOffice and stopped when I saw 
>> how cumbersome the thing was going to become.
>> I then moved to tables in Emacs and the difficulty of having word-wrapping 
>> in cells stopped me after 5 minutes of searching on the web.
>> 
>> I’m left with using an org file, with titles, tags, etc. But I’m wondering 
>> if it’s the best approach.
>> 
>> Thank you in advance for your input.
> 
> Hello Jean,
> 
> I recently did qualitative and quantitative analysis of my partner’s PhD data 
> using Emacs, and it was really easy for me. But before I recommend you 
> anything I’d have to know what does your data look like? Do you have mostly 
> qualitative questions or are the questions done using a questionnaire with 
> some form of scaling like Likert scale?

The data I have is open interviews without a base questionnaire. That's the 
data I collated during my MA and I need to analyse it also to create the basis 
for a more structured questionnaire.

Does that answer your question?

> If it’s purely qualitative then you’re probably better of in first conducting 
> an analysis using different qualitative analysis software,

How would I go about that? I mean what kind of software are you thinking about?

> but if its the latter or even mostly latter, you can first have your data on 
> spreadsheet. And it shouldn’t be that cumbersome, I had data of 135 subjects, 
> each of which answered 206 questions. It does take time, but that’s the 
> grumpy work of data pre-processing. Once you’re done with that, I’d say 
> convert it to .csv and then use R. Emacs has fantastic support for R through 
> Emacs Speaks Statistics (ESS), and I’ve loved it!
> 
> Regards,
> --
> Divya Ranjan,
> Philosophy, Mathematics, Libre Software.

-- 
Jean-Christophe Helary
@jchelary@emacs.ch
https://sr.ht/~brandelune/