Lesson 13: writing text within ATLAS/ti: memos and annotations

The core of sociologic analyzes is the text which is not only the text to be analyzed but mainly text that is being produced as a result of your analytical work. As a basic rule it may not be helpful to be oriented at a clearly structured phase-model of the sociologic work-process and interpret writing of report-texts as a secondary and completely distinctive phase of data-acquisition and data-analysis. You need scripting-techniques to accompany the process especially if the research-task is more complex to enable you to express and make available for your work whatever cannot be clearly expressed with simple code-labels or with semantic networks. This technique within the methodology of sociologic science (but also in other fields) is known as "memoing". For this purpose ATLAS/ti provides each workspace of a HU with one or more editor-functions and additionally a separate administration of memo-texts through the memo-list.

You will have to differentiate between comments and memos: comments are due to the application's logic no independent objects that may be administered but are textual tags of other objects. This way you can add descriptive comments to either codes, quotations or even to families and have them displayed within a comment-window upon activation of the appropriate object (usually the yellow windows in the special list-windows.).

Unlike comments though, memos are independent objects that must explicitly be created and then administered in their specific list. Those memo-objects may be related to other objects (not qualitatively definable) only at a later stage. There are a number of approaches to create memos that mainly depend on the object the memo will be related to. The simple way is the creation of a "free" completely unbound memo and works according to the procedure of creating a "free" code in the code-list window except that the memo-list window has to be opened in this case.

After entering a name you have created a blank memo that can now be edited within the yellow editor-window of the memo-list. However this is not comfortable because of the small size of the window. For full-length writing it is therefore recommended to select the "edit" option from the context-menu and have your memo displayed in a separate feature-rich editor-window. By default all texts are created and saved as standard ASCII-text. Alternatively it is also possible to save the texts as "Rich Text-Format" (rtf) allowing you to make use of a number of formatting such as bold or italic.

If you intend to add a memo to a certain text-fragment that you have quotationd or maybe even coded simply follow this procedure: You simply click the yellow button in the vertical primary-text toolbar. Then a small window to enter the name of the memo appears. There are two options: If one of the codes with which the quotation was coded has been set active ATLAS/ti suggests that code label along with the primary-text number and quotation number as the name (you may change the default now or at any time). In case no belonging code was active a name must be entered.

A very elegant and comfortable way of creating free memos is available in connection with most wordprocessors. You may drag and drop marked text-passages while holding down the left mouse button and pressed from any text-document loaded in the wordprocessor into the network-editor. As a result a memo with that content is automatically being generated and displayed. The memo is as all other memos administered in the memo-list (you may especially change the automatically generated names). Please note that if you are not keeping pressed the text is being cut from the wordprocessor-file! (However this might be sometimes intended)

Memos are differentiated by „Memo-types". Assigning of the appropriate memos is accomplished through the context-menu which will help you to differentiate between the generated types of text (for example you might write interpretative memos for the particular text-fragments which you may want to label as a „comment") (knowing that those comments have another state than the code-comments!); you are producing memos that are the subject of methodic question. After a while you are writing correct theory-memos. These differences may be expressed by typifying. The various types can then be used as a filter- or sort-criteria.

However you can facilitate typifying by using the proven "Families" because there is also a memo family-editor available for memos. This version has a number of advantages since you are already familiar with it from other areas and secondly you can better comment your typified passages. Finally it allows you to faster change the assignations than by typifying. Also you can easily assign text containing both information about the method as well as about the theory to both families.

All memos are stored within the HU and are therefore no independent files. If texts are becoming larger and larger the HU file is growing as well and also slower and slower. A workaround is to separate a particular or all memos from the HU and to save them as independent files. This action is known as „outsourcing" within the ATLAS/ti terminology and the feature is located below „miscellaneous" in the memo context-menu. You may choose to outsource either a few or all memos while it is recommended that you limit your choice to only the larger memos. This is especially because Windows 95 always takes up an entire segment of the harddisk regardless of the file-size and is therefore a waste of harddisk-capacity.

IMPORTANT: ATLAS/ti administers the filenames of the outsourced macros independently because the application must be able to retrieve and identify them from the harddisk at a later stage. Therefore you may under no circumstances modify those (cryptic) filenames from outside of the application. However you may edit the memos in separate editors --- as long as you are not changing the file-format (.txt or .rtf).