FromText: New Functionalities for a QDA Software

Abstract

The work that resulted on this paper began as an effort to determine the functionalities required in a qualitative data analysis software created by the authors’ research group as part of a study. The software is web-based, free and open-source, with a beta version available at www.fromtext.net. In accordance with Actor-Network theory, the software assists and optimizes text reading with graphs that display textual occurrences of words chosen by users and the connections established by those words in each occurrence, all without automating the processing or using algorithms to simplify text content. The functionalities to be developed for the software’s second version and their main advantages were determined via experiments (in which the first usage scenarios were sketched), internal evaluations conducted by our research group and a trial of the software with students during a workshop. This paper presents a new resource for qualitative research and discusses the functionalities necessary for the type of research and software proposed by the authors.