GIPI · Grupo Imágenes Palabras e Ideas

Atlas.ti

What is Atlas ti? How it could help us?

‘ATLAS.ti’ is a workbench for the qualitative analysis of large bodies of textual, graphical, audio and video data. It offers a variety of tools for accomplishing the tasks associated with any systematic approach to "soft" data--i.e., material which cannot be analyzed by formal, statistical approaches in meaningful ways.

It also helps researchers who need to combine subtle coding with qualitative linking, shaping, searching and modelling.

Atlas.ti allows us to combine a double dimension in our analysis, integrating a narrative (qualitative) and analytical (quantitative) perspective.

 



Some characteristics of Atlas Ti

  • Intuitive interface: The interface emulates the traditional paper & pencil desktop style. Source data is displayed on the left side of the screen while marked segments, codes, and notes about the data appear in the margin area on the right-hand side.
  • Data management. Huge number of supported data formats. Use text documents in plain text, Rich Text or PDF formats, work with audio files in mp3, au, wma, or wav format, with video files in mpeg, wmf, or avi formats, with graphic files like tif, multi page tif, gif, emf, jpeg formats, or with live Google Earth documents, kml and kmz formats (and many more).
  • Organization and usability. The object explorer functions like a directory of your entire project. It displays all objects and their related sub-objects (documents and their quotations, codes and their quotations, memos and their linked objects, families of objects and their members, network views with the objects they contain) in a hierarchical tree view. Access your data via the various sub trees directly. It allows easy document, quotation and code management.
  • Coding. Fine-grained units of analysis. Text: character / image: pixel / audio: millisecond / video: frame.. Automatic segment selection. When selecting text, precise text segments (word, sentence, or paragraph) can be selected via a double click.
  • Memos und comments. Fully annotatable. Every object in ATLAS.ti can be annotated: documents, quotations, codes, memos, project, all types of families, network views, relations between data segments or codes. .
  • Hyperlinking. Linking at data level. Point-to-point jumping around the dataset at data level is similar to clicking on a link in the World Wide Web: Point out a connection within a text or letting your data come alive by linking a text passage to a video segment. As images and audio/video documents are stand alone documents in ATLAS.ti, there is no need to link to an external document. .
  • Visualize all your work. All objects (documents, quotations, codes, memos, families of objects and icons of other network views) and their relation to each other can be graphically displayed.
  • Working with variables. Intelligent data handling. The Primary Document Family tool allows you to group documents by criteria like age, gender, profession, education, year, status, type, etc. .
  • Searches and filters. Simple code retrieval. Data segments coded with a particular code can be retrieved by double-clicking on a code.
  • Query tool. The unique Query Tool lets you search for coded segments based on a combination of codes. .
  • Co-occurence Explorer. The Co-occurence Explorer offers a cross tabulation of ‘codes by codes.’ Within each cell, access to the coded data segments is provided. Results of a cross-tabulation are displayed as tree view or in a table. View either quotation content or frequencies of occurrence. ATLAS.ti also offers a c-coefficient as an indicator of the strength of the relation between two codes.
  • Quantification. Frequency of codes by documents. The Codes-Primary Document-Table shows the frequency of codes by documents and can be exported as Excel / Calc table (or as text file). Instead of code frequencies, a further option is to let ATLAS.ti count the words within the coded segments per code.
  • SPSS output. All codings can be exported as SPSS syntax file. The SPSS data matrix displays codes, super codes and code families as variables, coded segments as cases. .
  • On board transcription. Audio or video files can be transcribed inside ATLAS.ti using the new A-Docs function. Transcripts can be synchronized with the associated audio or video file so that you can jump from a particular point in the transcript to the original recording.




  • More...

  • Official Web Site of the software Atlas.ti
  • How to use Atlas.ti (.pdf file; in Spanish)

Website Research Group Imágenes, Palabras e Ideas. Madrid. 2009.
Coordination: Pilar Lacasa. Editing and digital support: David Herrero Martínez. Web Master: Luis Briso de Montiano Aldecoa. Graphic Design: Rebeca Ochoa Bernabé

Website Research Group Imágenes, Palabras e Ideas. Madrid. 2009. All rights reserved | Credits - Last Update: 22/10/2011