Mac application to do Critical Discourse Analysis?

September 7, 2010 3:01 PM

Does anyone have any recommendations for a Mac application that I can use to do Critical Discourse Analysis? I thought I would be able to use Sente for this, but I am realizing that it would be too cumbersome because I cannot easily and quickly change the highlighting color. I would consider Atlas ti, but I am worried that the theory behind it might not be fully compatible with what I am trying to do. (I am using the Critical Discourse Analysis of Norman Fairclough).

At minimum, I would like to be able to take notes on pdfs, highlight in different colors with a minimum of steps, and search my notes, but I am also open to recommendations as to what I should be looking for in an application.

posted by Original 1928 Flavor to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Would this link at the AEA help? It's a list of qualitative analysis software, and a few are for a Mac.
posted by angiep at 4:02 PM on September 7, 2010

I've used Atlas.ti on a Mac, not for CDA but other qualitative analysis, and it was ok. I didn't really like the interface (especially given that it's not Mac-native; I run it using VMWare). I felt like it made searching for things too difficult (sorry, I don't have time to learn Grep commands), and in general Atlas seems to be optimized for grounded theory. HyperResearch is Mac native, and while I myself haven't used it yet, I do have colleagues who have used it for various flavors of discourse analysis and feel like it works ok. It's on my list of things to check out. I don't know offhand if HyperResearch can use PDFs directly.

Really, there's not much else in QDA software that runs native on Macs :(
posted by DiscourseMarker at 8:00 PM on September 7, 2010