Labels: a new qualitative text analysis system

[Mr Al]

Labels is a qualitative text analysis system that I've written. It's simple - a set of Python scripts used to process documents marked up using XML. Though it is certainly not perfect, Labels is usable - I've have been using it myself quite effectively in recent months.

A warning. Labels has known bugs, and I can't make guarantees about its performance. Nevertheless, if you'd like to try it, please do. It is hosted on Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/labels/

[durand]

I'm curious now. What exactly does qualitative text analysis mean?

[Mr Al]

Qualitative text analysis is text analysis that isn't quantitative! ;) Most qualitative text analysis programs (NVivo (http://www.qsrinternational.com/) & Atlas.ti (http://www.atlasti.com/) are probably the most common) involve manually 'tagging' the text you want to analyse, and enable you then to retreive that text based on the keywords it has been tagged with. That's basically what the system I have come up with does.

[durand]

Sounds interesting but I don't have a use for it just yet :P

[gommista]

I'm interested to know if there are any other open-source programs for qualitative research. I'm not to savvy with Ubuntu, so not sure I could put up with a lot of bugs. Any other recommendations folks might have other than this labels program?

[audunmb]

gommista: I found this, but haven't tried it yet: http://www.pressure.to/qda/

[Mr Al]

The other open source qualitative text analysis program that I know of is the GNU step version of TAMS (http://sourceforge.net/projects/tamsys/). I've never had much luck with that or Weft QDA, though...