ATLAS/ti Course

• Notes on marketing qualitative software
• The basic purpose of ATLAS/ti
• A typical work-procedure
• Variability of the working-steps

Lesson 3: Look&Feel: Becoming familiar with the user-interface

• Main menu – button bar
• Buttons of the main menu
• Pop-up list windows
• Primary document -window

• Start Atlas and open "grounded theory" Hermeneutical Unit.
• Explore menu's and buttons, identify ones presented in the this lesson's text.
• Try right-clicking on various parts of the screen.
• Explore the help-system. Read something from the first few chapters. Take a short look also at the subsequent chapters just to see what kinds of matters are present there (spend more time in the help-system later at your own time, and come back here whenever you have problems). Try also the "index" section of help and read some texts there. ("Find"-section may be usefull later on if you cannot find what you need from the index)

Lesson 4: Configuring the application and its components

• General:
• HU-editor:
• Fonts:
• Storage:
• Path:
• Text Editors

All types of data, foremost textual data are initially taken into consideration: transcripts of tape-recordings, observation-protocols, documents that shall undergo a content-analysis as well as graphics, images or even audio-files may be linked and analyzed as files within ATLAS.

• Linking PD's
• Changing the character set
• Renaming PD's (internal and external names):
• Changing the order of PD's
• Editing PD's

• 3 text independent coding options
• 4 functions for successive coding
• In-vivo-codes
• Coding with active code
• Coding via drag&drop

• Think a while about the codes you are going to use. Read a few songs and try to come up with concepts that would characterize parts of the songs, or differences between songs.
• Create a few free codes
• Try the mouse-clicking methods from previous lesson to select quotations to be coded and experiment with the coding buttons (in the middle of the vertical toolbar - with pictures of boxes and lines betweeb them)
• See what happens if you right-click on a selected passage and choose Coding
• Open the list of codes in an extra window ( Codes - Extra list) or clicking on the small list-icon besides the codes-dropdown list) and experiment with dragging codes from the extra list to selected passages of text.

Lesson 9: How to organize codes

• Functions for a code
• Functions for a list of codes

• Unlink a code from a quotation (delete a coding - not a code)by right-clicking on a code in the margin-area.
• Open the "extra list" for your codes. Comment some of your codes by writing on the yellow field.
• See what actions are availlable when you right-click on a code in the extras list.
• See what is behind "miscellanious".
• Experiment with sorting and filtering your codes.
• See what kind of output you can get based on your codes Check out at least "quotation references" and codes-primary texts". ("Quotation retrieval" will be studied later in connection with the Query Tool. Many other output options are not interesting at this stage before codes have been organized by linking or by creation of supercodes etc.)

Lesson 10: Working with families

• What are "families"?
• Filter- and search-criteria
• Filtering object-lists

• Create PT-families (eg. "female author", "male author", "new song", "old song") and assing primary texts to them.
• Create code-families (eg. "location", "emotions") and assign codes to them (note - many things you can do with code-families you can also do, perhaps more elegantly, by defining relations between codes or by using supercodes).
• Experiment with filtering codes by the families.
• Filter the primary-texts by the families you created (document -filter - family) and make some listings (code - output) using different families.

Lesson 11: Editing relations with the network-editor

• The network editor
• Creating a relationship
• The relationship-editor

• Build yourself a network
• Try having open one window for the network and one extra list for your codes, and drag codes to the network window. Use Link to establish relations. (spend some time thinking about the types of relations)
• The contents of the network maybe a hierachy of terms, indicating that (codes for) the future and the past are temporal perspectives, that future-perspective includes thing like planning, past-perspective maybe memories, regret, etc. Or maybe that "settings" include natural places and urban places etc...

  Lesson 12: Textsearch and Autocoding

  
  
  Atlas.ti provides advanced search-features to assist in locating passages of text: Search-swarms and grep-searching. These features can be used also to autocode passages containing specified words.
  • Search-features
  • Search-expressions
  • Searching with GREP
  • Autocoding
  Practice
  • Build a seach expression to search for references to self (I, me, mine, my...).
  • Save this expression for future use
  • Use this expression to autocode your PT's.
  • Check the codings produced by autocoding (never trust a stupid machine!) manually.
  • Try out the "grep" (regular expression) search by looking for occurances of some word only when it is in the beginning of a sentence (use ^ ). Grep-search is a rather difficult subject, let us try not to spend too much time with it)

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

  
  
  Practice
  Write comments about all the PT's you have. Write a memo about a code, and link it to the code in the Network Editor.
  

  Lesson 14: Data retrieval -The query tool

  As contrasted to a simple text-search, the query tool is a retrieval-feature is not looking for formal indicators in the data itself but rather retrieves text-sections based on the coding done previosly. The query language is a very powerful tool, but learning to use it will take some getting used to.

  • The difference between a query- and a text-search.
  • Query Tool: user-interface
  • The query-language
  • Forming a query
  • Arrangement of the query-window
  • Operators
    • Boolean operators
    • Semantic- or Thesaurus-operators
    • Proximity-operators
  • Additional functions
  • Supercodes
  Practice
  • Try out simple AND and OR queries.
  • Do some semantical queries. Use the network-relations built earlier (eg. SUB(Time-orientation))
  • Combine semantical and logical queries (SUB(time-orientation) and SELF .. "self" being the code created earlier by autocoding)
  • Create a supercode from your more successfull queries.
  • Limit the queries to some PT-families using the "textbase selection" button.
  • Use the queries to make quick comparisons - compare results from different textbase-selections, or try similar queries with some different codes.