10.28.2007

Networked content

A very pleasant surprise - mere weeks after releasing QDA Miner 3.0, the team at Provalis Research have issued another features update.

Users now have the ability to import Atlas-ti 5.x "hermeneutic units" and to export co-occurrence matrices for network analysis.

Proprietary data formats have been a real limitation in CAQDAS software, keeping most users "locked-in" to whichever platform they use at the beginning of their work. I seriously doubt computer-supported data analysis will really "take-off" as long as such barriers exist.

Transfer to network analysis packages is less significant, only because QDA Miner has always had this feature (export matrix as Excel file, which most SNA packages read quite well). There are many examples of combined content and network analyses, but this seems to be a very underdeveloped technique in social science.

It's great to see developers of such great software continue to stretch and dissolve boundaries. Kudos to Normand for breaking down some walls.

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