Using libreoffice for content analysis in texts?

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floral
Posts: 35
Joined: Sat Nov 20, 2010 9:09 pm

Using libreoffice for content analysis in texts?

Post by floral »

Hello, I have this question for a long time and I decided that there has to be a way (or must) to conduct content analysis on LibreOffice.

Basically, I used in the past nVivo, which is AWSOME but not open-source, plus it has an issue if text is inside table cells http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3wdeZUZGVY
It gives to the user to opportunity to add keywords (= nodes in nVivo) to specific areas of different text files (which have been imported to nVivo in advance)
After this, you can use the keywords to search your text and find all the fragments that include that keyword (and export them as fragments + indication of their original place in the text) OR you can rearrange the keywords into families-trees (like pyramids, some keywords are divided into others, i.e. tree < appletree OR orangetree OR pinetree), or even rename them.

My question is whether it is possible to do this in LibreOffice and how.
Please bare in mind that I know the basic use of Writer and Draw only. I have no experience in Calc or Base, so please be specific :)

I decided to ask the question after a lot of thinking, because I thought that it may be possible if the keywords are with a magic way - I have no idea how :oops: - imported into Base. The keywords are actually a database that the user produces while linking certain words/phrases/sentences/paragraphs to a keyword.
I assume that there is a way to do this in one text, what about in multiple texts?
Is this possible to be done in LibreOffice and how??

I have searched a lot for a decent easy-to-use open source software to conduct content analysis (the keywords mark certain content) but I have not been able to find one.
If there is a way to do this with LibreOffice, it would be priceless!!!! :D

P.S.: I found this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv1zNQurSiI which shows content analysis in excell, so I suppose it would be possible in Calc, however, what if the initial text source is in Writer?

I apologise if I have not posted in the right section of the forum.
LibreOffice 3.5.1.2 on Ubuntu 10.04
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Robert Tucker
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Joined: Mon Oct 08, 2007 1:34 am
Location: Manchester UK

Re: Using libreoffice for content analysis in texts?

Post by Robert Tucker »

floral wrote: use the keywords to search your text and find all the fragments that include that keyword (and export them as fragments + indication of their original place in the text)
PowerGrep claims to be able to do this and:
..can group identical matches together and count them, producing informative statistics.
There is a 15 day free trial otherwise €119. I had a little go with it for another purpose a few days ago and I didn't find its user interface terribly intuitive.

The OpenOffice extension Linguist can produce:
...complete lists of all words in a text document - either as an alphabetical list or sorted after word frequency - and with a readability calculating function that expresses readability in a unit called Lix.
You no doubt know about desktop search tools like Copernic, web scrapers like OutWit and bibliographic tools like Zotero.
floral wrote: rearrange the keywords into families-trees
You might need to explain this further.
LibreOffice 7.x.x on Arch and Fedora.
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