Screenshot from MAXQDA.įile: Troseth, G.L. Issue with visual correspondence of coding strip with coded content. Young Children’s Use of Video as a Source of Socially Relevant Information. Screenshots from NVIVO.įile: Troseth, G.L. Issue with selecting larger amounts of data while scrolling. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 4(1), 39–103. Interaction Analysis : Foundations and Practice. Issues with highlighting data across pages. the software comparison below) for example linked PDFs cannot be annotated in NVIVO. Note also that not all PDFs can be coded and viewed in QDA software (cf. Given that you might stare at your data for months (or years!), it is worth transforming data into text files beforehand. This being said: While this is a non-issue if you deal with just a few PDFs, these things can become quite frustrating in the long run. Also, files that have text in several columns can be funky to code too ff you’ve used the Adobe Reader for highlighting PDFs, you’ll probably know what I’m talking about. Even with OCR supported files, highlighting text across page boundaries can be tedious – especially if the file has headers and footers. Issues with codingĬoding PDFs in QDA software feels a bit like putting a thread through a needle one a train. This will make it harder to send the project file to other researchers, and it will cause the QDA software to run sluggishly, or even crash more often. Linking files takes some of this strength away.īut what about just importing the PDF into the project file? If a program allows PDFs to be integrated into the project file, this main file will get very large very quickly. One of the great strengths of QDA software is that all your stuff lives in one place. All of this means that the whole project is not as easily transportable anymore. Otherwise the software won’t know where the PDFs are. a USB stick), you’ll have to make sure that the location of the stick (e.g. If you link PDFs from a portable device, (e.g. If you move your files or modify the path names, the link is broken if you’re working on a different computer, you won’t be able to see your linked data. For example, if you save your PDFs in C:\library\pdfs (or if the program does this for you), the software will always look for this path when you open a PDF in the QDA software. If they are linked, it is important that the place where the PDFs are saved stays the same. PDFs can be linked to project files, or integrated into project files. If you have questions concerning OCR recognition & PDF conversion, please contact our specialists at MERIT library: on converting PDFs can be found all over the web here’s a how-to from the University of Iowa.įile: Ochs, E. This will heavily influence how your data is represented in retrievals, and it will greatly impact the appearance of the export of your retrievals. If the characters in your files are not already recognized in the PDF, you will be only able to code a PDF as it were a picture (in software in which you can tag/code pictures). journal articles) these days already come like that, but the scan of the copy of your advisor’s advisor’s dissertation microfiche data-set probably won’t. You will only be able to highlight & code text in a PDF if the document ran through OCR (optical character recognition, see Wikipedia) beforehand. Zotero, Mendeley, RefWorks, EndNote etc). Although QDA software can be used as a library for your PDF literature, specialized programs are much more powerful with this task (e.g. PDF support is advertised as a feature in modern QDA software but due to ongoing issues in terms of performance & user-friendliness, I would strongly advise users to convert their files into text documents (e.g. RTF files before importing – due to issues with character recognition, issues with mobility & performance, coding practice, and export. A general note on using PDFsĪlthough MAXQDA, NVIVO & ATLAS.TI offer the import and/or linking of PDFs, users should transform their PDFs into. In this overview I’ll outline general issues with the use of PDFs in QDA software, and I’ll briefly compare import/linking options of PDFs in different QDA packages. Using PDFs in QDA software is not a new feature, but working with this particular type of file is still somewhat tricky.
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