Extensible Markup Language and Qualitative Data Analysis

The increasing popularity of Extensible Markup Language (XML) and the availability of software capable of reading and editing XML documents present opportunities for Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) facilities to be incorporated into "groupware" applications such as collaborative workspaces and "document bases", and to be made available across networks both within organisations and across the Internet. Collaborative systems have, in the past, characteristically, been geared to retrieve and present whole documents, and while annotation and discussion of documents has been possible within such systems, the "pencil-level" analysis commonplace in CAQDAS (Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software) has been lacking. XML, when combined with a scripting language such as Perl, can be used to offer basic QDA functionnality—retrieval by text and codes, attachment of memos to text fragments, and the generation of summary data—via a standard web-browser.