The Hermeneutic Unit
The Hermeneutic Unit (HU) is perhaps the single most important concept for ATLAS.ti. Once you grasp the HU concept, you understand almost everything that is necessary to work with ATLAS.ti! And, luckily (and in spite of its impressive name!), it is extremely simple and very practical to use.
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Everything that is relevant to a particular project (e.g., a research topic) is part of the HU and resides in the electronic environment. For instance, the Primary Documents (PDs) representing the data sources, quotations, codes used for developing concepts, conceptual linkages (families, networks), and memos, etc., are all part of one HU.
The lowest level of an HU contains the PDs, followed closely by the "quotations" as selections of PDs. Codes refer to quotations. Memos - you meet them everywhere.
An HU can become a highly connected entity, a dense web of primary data, associated memos and codes, and interrelations between the codes and the data. To find your way through this web, ATLAS.ti provides powerful browsing and editing tools. Think of the HU as the "spider in the web."
One obvious advantage of this bundling is that the user only has to deal with and think of one entity. Activating an HU is the straightforward selection of a single file; all associated material is then activated automatically. In this way, the HU provides the data structure for each project in ATLAS.ti.
BTW, the name name was chosen to reflect the original approach to building a support tool for text interpretation. We swear it wasn't our intention to frighten potential users with this admittedly tongue-twisting name!