[ANN] Weft QDA 0.9.6

[Alex Fenton]

I'm pleased to announce the release of Weft QDA version 0.9.6.

homepage: http://www.pressure.to/qda/
rubyforge: http://www.rubyforge.org/projects/weft-qda/

Weft QDA is an end-user GUI application for the analysis of unstructured
textual data, such as interview transcripts, written documents and
fieldnotes. It's intended for use in anthropology, sociology and other
social sciences and humanities. It is particularly designed to present a
simple, easy-to-use interface. It is currently available for Windows and
GNU Linux.

New features and improvements in this release include:

- category names can now be in non-latin scripts, eg Chinese
- coded text is highlighted in document and category windows
- new code review tool to compare coding of multiple categories
- faster coding and rearranging of categories
- interface improvements for Windows & Linux
- updated and expanded documentation
- new installer
- fixed numerous bugs

I'm hoping to release a version 1.0 soon, so bug reports and suggestions
for enhancements are especially welcome.

Many thanks to end users who have tried the application, and especially
to the authors and maintainers of the packages upon which Weft QDA is
built, including wxruby, sqlite-ruby and rubyscript2exe, who have
continued to offer important with this release. Also thanks to the
rubyforge hosts - the free services there have made development ten
times easier! I hate maintaining CVS servers!

alex

 

[Ara.T.Howard]

I'm pleased to announce the release of Weft QDA version 0.9.6.

homepage: http://www.pressure.to/qda/
rubyforge: http://www.rubyforge.org/projects/weft-qda/

Weft QDA is an end-user GUI application for the analysis of unstructured
textual data, such as interview transcripts, written documents and
fieldnotes. It's intended for use in anthropology, sociology and other social
sciences and humanities. It is particularly designed to present a simple,
easy-to-use interface. It is currently available for Windows and GNU Linux.

New features and improvements in this release include:

- category names can now be in non-latin scripts, eg Chinese
- coded text is highlighted in document and category windows
- new code review tool to compare coding of multiple categories
- faster coding and rearranging of categories
- interface improvements for Windows & Linux
- updated and expanded documentation
- new installer
- fixed numerous bugs

I'm hoping to release a version 1.0 soon, so bug reports and suggestions for
enhancements are especially welcome.

Many thanks to end users who have tried the application, and especially to
the authors and maintainers of the packages upon which Weft QDA is built,
including wxruby, sqlite-ruby and rubyscript2exe, who have continued to offer
important with this release. Also thanks to the rubyforge hosts - the free
services there have made development ten times easier! I hate maintaining CVS
servers!

alex

hi alex-

i'm working on a book about scientific programming with ruby... although this
project looks to be a bit much to do a case study on it is quite interesting.
perhaps we could get some sound bites from you in the future to include in the
book.

are you doing any other scientifically bent work with ruby?

kind regards.

p.s. random stuff about the book will appear here

http://sciruby.codeforpeople.com/sr.cgi/TheScientificRubyProgrammingBook

-a
--
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| email :: ara [dot] t [dot] howard [at] noaa [dot] gov
| phone :: 303.497.6469
| My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.
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===============================================================================

 

[Alex Fenton]

Hi

i'm working on a book about scientific programming with ruby... although
this
project looks to be a bit much to do a case study on it is quite
interesting.

Really interesting to hear about this book. Looking at the list of
projects, and also from following c.l.r. it seems that almost all
current work relates to natural sciences and engineering, and little for
humanities and social sciences. This is probably mostly to do with 1)
there being more problems in natural science disciplines that are
tractable to computational intensification and 2) there being more
people working in those sciences that have skills or training in
programming.

However, Perl has historically been used quite widely for research in
some humanities and soc sci, and Ruby has all the advantages that have
made Perl popular in, for example, textual and linguistic analysis. It
will be interesting to see whether Ruby's use in these fields will
increase as it matures and is better known. A couple of recent modules
supplying stemming algorithms might be a good example.

A couple of (mostly commercial) applications that do similar things to
Weft provide scripting languages. I'm planning to use Ruby to allow Weft
QDA users to do the same. Actually, this feature exists but is disabled
in release versions for the same reasons that I wouldn't hand users a
slightly unpredictable chainsaw with no instructions. But once it has a
properly documented API and a helpful GUI, it will be interesting to see
how much the type of people who use this software (non-programmers, but
often with experience in simple scripting languages in e.g. stat
packages) find Ruby as a scripting tool. My hunch is that they will like it!

regards
alex