What's new in QDA Miner 4.0
Dec 15, 2011
- The first thing you will notice when running version 4 for the first time will be the new look of QDA Miner. We implemented a more modern-looking interface, with more icons than ever before. If you are already familiar with the menu structure of QDA Miner, you will find that almost everything remains in its original location. But we did split the ANALYZE menu in two in order to group all text- and coding-retrieval functions under a new RETRIEVAL menu, and we kept all the remaining analysis features under the existing ANALYZE menu.,Aside from these cosmetic changes, you will find a lot of powerful and unique new features
- We really take the concept of "computer-assistance" seriously
- QDA Miner has always offered more computer assistance for coding, analysis and report writing than any other qualitative software on the market. For example, QDA Miner 3.2 had not just one, but four different text-search tools: Boolean search, query-by-example, keyword retrieval and section retrieval. The version 4.0 continues this trend by implementing two truly innovative text-search tools: the cluster extraction and coding tool and the code-similarity search tool. These two new text-search tools based on machine learning and information-retrieval techniques represent very efficient tools for faster and more consistent coding. Make sure you check out the flash demos of these new features
- The missing dimension in geotagging
- We have witnessed the implementation of geo-tagging in other QDA software. We were not totally convinced of the value of such features until we realized that there was one crucial dimension missing: time. Many researchers need to locate events not only in space but also in time. They also need to examine the distribution of events on those two dimensions. QDA Miner 4.0 allows one to attach geographic coordinates and time tags to any coded segment or to an uncoded text segment, and to produce static and dynamic maps in Google Earth, ArcView or similar programs, as well as interactive timelines. We also added two related search tools. One of them, allows one to extract sentences and paragraphs with time or space information and to perform autocoding and auto-tagging. We also implemented a link retrieval tool that allows one to extract coded segments specific to a time period or within a specified distance from a geographic location. All these, in addition to the ability to attach custom placemarks, import locations from ESRI shapefiles and perform location searches, make of QDA Miner, one, if not the most powerful geotagging qualitative tools on the market
- Improved visualization, more flexibility, and much more
- We made numerous improvements to existing tools, such as the memo-ing system, the dendrograms, the multidimensional scaling plots and the proximity plots. We also added tag clouds. The importation of PDF files has been greatly improved. Numerous new useful features have been implemented and will be greatly appreciated by current and new users. We even added an automatic backup feature. No matter how often we stress to our users the importance of keeping backup copies of their project and how easy backups can be performed in QDA Miner, many people still fail to back up critical data. So we implemented an automatic backup function that will be set by default to be triggered every month (one can disable this feature or customize it to be performed at shorter or longer intervals). Those are just a few examples of some of the new features of QDA Miner 4