[Air-L] Email Analysis Software

[Stuart Shulman]

...could also use CAT to code your emails:

http://www.qdap.pitt.edu/cat.htm

I coded a lot of emails to help build a system used by the USFWS to
review 640,000 emailed public comments about the proposed listing of
the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species
Act. You can actually play with the tools we built for the USFWS and
see all the comments online for one of the Grey Wolf de-listing
decisions at:

http://erulemaking.cs.cmu.edu/services/fws-wolf-1018-av39/guestlogin.php

If you are an information retrieval geek, you might like this system.
The simple fact that you can see, sort, and search though hundreds of
thousands of emails in a case like this is a novelty, but we hope, the
way of the future.

The coding we did to build this system was done by teams of coders
using ATLAS.ti. Now, we exclusively use CAT, which is free and will be
open source in a year or less. I cannot imagine going back to a
software package so dependent on the computer mouse for coding. CAT is
designed to reduce the physical and mental strain on coders to help
them get the coding done as fast and as accurately as possible.

I would like to see CAT become an open standard for annotations that
can be used and re-used by diverse research communities to build up
repositories of coded data.

~Stu


On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 5:36 PM, gus andrews <gus.andrews at gmail.com> wrote:
> Derek, have you tried Atlas TI? I have just started tinkering with it on the
> advice of a colleague who's used it pretty happily for analyzing
> conversations. I personally am working on blog comment threads with it. So
> far it's been a little frustrating -- there's some massaging of text files
> needed to get the comment threads into the program, and then tagging is a
> little difficult -- but I think it's more because I am not well-practiced
> with the software yet. All in all it seems to have a hugely rich ability to
> create tags and themes, and to display these in a variety of ways.
>
> The big benefit of Atlas TI is that once you've run out your 30-day trial
> period, a grad student license for the software is only something like $100.
> Not sure what it runs for professors, but for me, this is a pretty big help.
>
> I'd be interested to hear from anyone else who's used Atlas TI as well.
>
> Gus
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-- 
Stuart Shulman
Neighborhood Team Leader
Squirrel Hill - Point Breeze, PA
Obama for America