The following is the course outline of a 3-day training workshop for Provalis Research text analytics software, QDA Miner and WordStat.
Overview
Three approaches to text analysis
Qualitative Analysis
Quantitative Content Analysis
Text Mining
Introduction to Provalis Research software QDA Miner
Introduction and project management
Codebook management and manual coding
Security features and text retrieval tools
Coding Frequency and Retrieval
Code co-occurrence and case similarity analysis
Assessing relationship between coding and variables
Using the Report Manager and the Command Log
Performing teamwork
Miscellaneous Functions
WordStat
Content Analysis or Text Mining
Analyzing words without dictionaries – a text mining approach
Content Analysis – Principles ofdictionary construction
Importing and exporting data
Introduction to automatic document classification
Day 1
QDA Miner
Part 1 – Introduction and project management
Introduction to CAQDAS using QDA Miner
The CASE x VARIABLE file structure
The Mixed-Method approach
Quick overview of the work environment
The four windows – CASE, VARIABLES, CODES, and DOCUMENT
The menu system
Creating of a new project
Creating a new project from a list of documents
Creating a new project from an existing data file
Creating an empty project / defining structure
Using the document conversion wizard
Customizing and personalizing the project
The PROJECT | PROPERTIES dialog
The PROJECT | NOTES command
Manipulating variables
Adding a variable – VARIABLES | ADD
Deleting a variable – VARIABLES | DELETE
Changing the variable data type – VARIABLES | TRANSFORM
Recoding the values of a variable – VARIABLES | TRANSFORM | RECODE
Reordering variables – VARIABLES | REORDER
Changing variable properties – VARIABLES | PROPERTIES
Manipulating cases
Add a new case – CASES | ADD
Deleting cases – CASES | DELETE
Importing new documents in new cases – CASES | APPEND DOCUMENTS/IMAGES
Changing the case grouping and description – CASES | GROUPING/DESCRIPTOR
PART 2 – Codebook management and manual coding
Creating codes and managing the codebook
Creating codes and categories – CODES | ADD
Modifying an existing code – CODES | EDIT
Delete existing codes – CODES | DELETE
Moving codes in the codebook
Merging codes in the codebook – CODES | MERGE
Splitting codes in the codebook – CODES | SPLIT
Importing an existing codebook – CODES | IMPORT
Manual coding of documents (versus autocoding)
The four basic methods for assigning codes to text segments:
Highlight text segment then drag a code
Highlight text segment then double-click a code
Highlight text segment then select code and button (toolbar)
Drag and drop a code over a paragraph (or a sentence – press ALT)
Assignment of multiple codes to the same segment (press CTRL)
Modifying existing coding
Working with code marks
Viewing coding information
Adding a comment to a coding – COMMENT
Remove a coding – REMOVE CODING
Change the code assigned to a text segment – RECODE TO
Resizing a segment – RESIZE
Consolidating codes – CODES | CONSOLIDATE
Searching and replacing codes – CODES | SEARCH & REPLACE
Hiding code marks – CODES | HIDE CODINGS
Highlighting coded segments – DOCUMENT | CODED TEXT
PART 3 – Security features and text retrieval tools
Using backup features
Creating a permanent backup – MAINTENANCE | BACKUP | CREATE
Restoring a backup – MAINTENANCE | BACKUP | RESTORE
Using the temporary session backup
Text retrieval tools (4)
Searching for text – ANALYSIS | TEXT RETRIEVAL
Performing a simple text search
Performing a complex text search (using Boolean and wildcard)
Performing a thesaurus search
Using the “search hits” table
Performing manual coding and autocoding
Saving to disk or printing the table
Retrieving sections in structured documents – ANALYSIS | SECTION RETRIEVAL
Performing a query by example – ANALYSIS | QUERY BY EXAMPLE
Finding text similar to a sample text segment
Providing relevance feedback to improve search results
Finding text similar to specific coded segments
Performing a “fuzzy string matching”
Performing a keyword search
Assigning keywords to codes
Performing a keyword retrieval on internal codes
Performing a keyword retrieval on WordStat dictionary files
PART 4 – Coding Frequency and Retrieval
Coding frequency
Creating a frequency list of all codes – ANALYSIS | CODING FREQUENCY
Creating a barchart or a pie chart on selected codes
Customizing the chart
Coding Retrieval
Performing a simple coding retrieval – ANALYSIS | CODING RETRIEVAL
Performing a complex search
Creating a text report
Creating a new project from
A shortcut for simple coding retrieval – | RETRIEVE SEGMENTS
Saving and Retrieving Queries
Retrieving a list of comments
Day 2
PART 5 – Code co-occurrence and case similarity analysis
Analyzing codes co-occurrences – ANALYSIS | CODING CO-OCCURRENCE
Hierarchical clustering of codes
2D and 3D multidimensional scaling plots
Using the Proximity plots
Assessing similarity of cases
Analyzing code sequences – ANALYSIS | CODING SEQUENCES
Choosing codes and setting minimum / maximum distances
Using the Sequence matrix
Searching and coding specific sequences
PART 6 – Assessing relationship between coding and variables
Analyzing coding by variables – ANALYSIS | CODING BY VARIABLE
Crosstabulating coding frequency by variables
Setting the content and format of the table
Computing correlation or comparison statistics
Comparing frequencies using barcharts or line charts
Creating and interpreting 2D and 3D correspondence plots
Creating and interpreting heatmaps
A quick overview of graphic coding features
PART 7 – Using the Report Manager and the Command Log
Using the Report Manager
Accessing the Report Manager – PROJECT | REPORT MANAGER
The Report Manager interface
Appending tables, graphics and quotes
Moving and organizing items using the table of content
Editing existing items / adding comments
Adding empty documents or folders and deleting existing items
Importing documents, images or tables
Searching and replacing text
Exporting results to HTML, Word or RTF files.
Using the Command Log
Introduction to the command log – PROJECT | COMMAND LOG Filtering log entries
Adding comments to log entries
Undoing previously performed operations
Repeating previously performed operations
Exporting the log table to disk
PART 8 – Performing teamwork
Preparing projects for teamwork – PROJECT | TEAMWORK
Creating user accounts and setting privileges
Creating new accounts
Defining users access rights
Forcing users to log in
Creating duplicate copies of a project
Sending a project by email
Merging projects and assessing coding reliability
Merging two or more projects
Planning teamwork for assessing coding agreement
Adjusting colors of code marks
Computing coding agreement – ANALYSIS | CODING AGREEMENT
The codebook and segmentation problems
Four levels of agreement
Presence or absence (0 or 1)
Frequency (0, 1, 2, etc.)
Coding importance (% of words)
Coding overlap
Correcting (or not) for chance agreement.
Identifying disagreements
Day 2
WordStat
PART 1 – Basic Word Statistics and Text Mining
Content Analysis or Text Mining
Running WordStat from QDA Miner or Simstat
Analyzing words without dictionaries – a text mining approach
Data preparation – misspelling and control characters
Basic word frequency analysis
Application of text pre-processing methods
Exclusion list – use with care
Lemmatization and stemming – limits and benefits
Setting upper and lower frequency criteria
A few additional options
Numeric and other non-alphabetic characters Braces and square brackets
Random sampling
Using disk or memory as the working space
Identifying themes using word co-occurrence analysis
Clustering words and measuring their proximity
Clustering documents based on the words they contains
Correlation and comparison analysis based on word usage
Performing crosstabs and computing statistics
Comparing words among the sources (document or text variables)
Correspondence analysis and heatmaps.
Day 3
PART 2 – Content Analysis – Principles of dictionary construction
Introduction to WordStat categorization dictionary
Dictionary structure and functions
Opening, saving, and creating categorization dictionaries
Creating manually categories of words and phrases
Principles of dictionary construction – Extracting features
Identification of technical terms and proper names (persons, places, products)
Identification of common misspellings
Extracting phrases
Creating an initial dictionary – Phrases technical terms and proper nouns words
Adding words manually
Adding words from tables Using the drag and drop editor
Organizing the dictionary (drag and drop)
Applying the dictionary
Setting different levels
Mixing dictionaries with words
Validating the dictionary
Finding words or phrases with improper meanings using the KWIC list
WordStat evaluation order – how to use this at your advantage
Disambiguation methods
Manual disambiguation Disambiguation using phrases Disambiguation using rules
Improving categorization dictionaries
Creating comprehensive dictionaries using the Suggest button.
Assessing coverage using the keyword retrieval feature
PART 3 – Advanced features
Importing and exporting data
Exportation of frequency data
