Key Functions
ATLAS.ti is a versatile 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 unstructured data, e.g., data that cannot be meaningfully analyzed by formal, statistical approaches.
In the course of qualitative analysis, ATLAS.ti helps you to explore the complex phenomena hidden in your textual and multimedia data. For coping with the inherent complexity of the tasks and data, ATLAS.ti offers a powerful, intuitive environment that keeps you focused on the materials to be analyzed.
It offers sophisticated tools to manage, extract, compare, explore, and reassemble meaningful segments of large amounts of data in flexible and creative, yet systematic ways.
Learn more about some of central concepts and features of ATLAS.ti:
ATLAS.ti's four predominant strategic modes of operation are encapsulated in the acronym "VISE":
Visualization
The visualization component of the program means directly supports the way human beings (this includes researchers!) think, plan, and approach solutions in creative, yet systematic ways.
Tools are offered to visualize complex properties and relations between the objects accumulated during the process of eliciting meaning and structure from the analyzed data.
The object-oriented design of ATLAS.ti seeks to keep the necessary operations close to the data to which they are applied. The visual approach of the interface keeps you focused on the data, and quite often the functions you need are just a few mouse clicks away.
Integration
Another fundamental design aspect of the software is to integrate all pieces that comprise a project, in order not to lose sight of the whole when going into detail.
Therefore, all relevant entities are stored in a container, the so-called "Hermeneutic Unit (HU).” Like the spider in its web, the HU keeps all data within reach. Loading a project with hundreds of files is merely a matter of opening a single HU.
Version 5 further strengthens the idea of integration as it allows the inclusion of a larger variety of data types into the analysis. Rich Text documents including Excel™, PowerPoint™, and other “embedded objects” can now be analyzed as easy as plain text was in the earlier versions of ATLAS.ti.
Serendipity
Webster’s Dictionary defines the word "serendipity" as "a seeming gift for making fortunate discoveries accidentally". Other translations are: fortunate accidents, lucky discoveries. In the context of information systems, one should add: To find something without having searched for it.
The term "serendipity" can be equated with an intuitive approach to data. A typical operation relying on the serendipity effect is "browsing". This information-seeking method is a genuine human activity: When you spend a day in the local library (or on the World Wide Web), you often start with searching for particular books (or key words). But after a short while, you typically find yourself increasingly engaged in browsing through books that were not exactly what you originally had in mind.
Examples of tools and procedures ATLAS.ti offers for exploiting the concept of serendipity are the Object Managers, the Object Explorer, the interactive margin area, full text search, and the hypertext functionality.
Exploration
Frankly, we threw in this term because needed an "e" to make for a smoother acronym! -)
Seriously, though: exploration is closely related to the above principles. Through an exploratory, yet systematic approach to your data (as opposed to a mere "bureaucratic" handling), it is assumed that especially constructive activities like theory building will be of great benefit. The entire program’s concept, including the process of getting acquainted with its particular idiosyncrasies, is particularly conducive to an exploratory, discovery-oriented approach.
There are two principal modes of working with ATLAS.ti, the Textual Level and the Conceptual Level.
- The textual level includes activities like segmentation of data files; coding text, image, audio, and video passages; and writing memos.
- The conceptual level focuses on model-building activities such as linking codes to networks.
A third and equally important aspect is the management of projects and the data.
Textual-Level Work
Textual-level research activities include segmenting PDs into quotations, adding comments to respective passages (note-making/annotating), and coding selected PD passages, secondary text materials, annotations, and memos to facilitate their retrieval. The act of comparing noteworthy segments leads to a creative conceptualization phase that involves higher-level interpretive work and theory-building.
Text - Structure - Text - the overall process of text interpretation with ATLAS.ti proceeds from text to structure to text:
ATLAS.ti assists you in all of these tasks and provides a comprehensive overview of your work as well as rapid search, retrieval, and browsing functions.
Within ATLAS.ti, initial ideas often find expression through their assignment to a code or memo, to which similar ideas or text selections also become assigned. ATLAS.ti provides the researcher with a highly effective means for quickly retrieving all data selections and notes relevant to one idea.
Conceptual Level Work
Beyond coding and retrieval, ATLAS.ti's networking feature allows you to visually "connect" selected passages, memos, and codes into diagrams that graphically outline complex relations.
This feature virtually transforms your text-based workspace into a graphical "playground" where you can construct concepts and theories based on relationships between codes, text passages, or memos. This process sometimes uncovers other relations in the data that were not obvious before and still allows you the ability to instantly revert to your notes or primary text selection. Such textual/conceptual modeling is unique to ATLAS.ti.
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.
)
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!
PDs represent the text, graphical, audio, and/or video materials that you wish to analyze. The content of PDs is usually stored in data files on your computer.
PDs are usually created by assigning files to an HU. You can, however, also assign a memo as a PD. You can assign as many documents as needed for a given HU.
Media Types
ATLAS.ti can display and process four different media types: text, graphic, audio, and video data.
Text: Textual PDs can consist of plain or rich text (RTF = Rich Text Format). Objects like a PowerPoint™ presentation or an Excel™ table can be embedded and edited. With certain restrictions, Word™, WordPerfect™, MS Works™ or HTML documents can be directly used as PDs.
Images: More than twenty graphic file formats are directly supported by ATLAS.ti including Windows Bitmap (BMP), TIFF, JPG, and Kodak Photo CD.
Multimedia: ATLAS.ti supports a number of audio and video formats utilizing Windows’ Multimedia Control Interface (MCI). MCI needs to be correctly installed and configured in order to work with multimedia files.
)
