Installing NVIVO
I've been using Trisquel for few years at home. Recently, I joined a research team using a qualitative analysis software called NVIVO (www.qsrinternational.com). It proprietary and runs under OSX or Windows. If possible I'd rather keep my Trisquel and virtualise OSX or Windows than switching to OSX or Windows completely. Is there any way to do this under Trisquel?
I run my CAQDAS in windows under VirtualBox. It works quite well.
Btw, instead of NVivo (which my department uses) I use Transana because it is open source
Thank you very much for your help GNUbahn!
I can't install Virtualbox. It seems to be because I run Trisquel 7 (https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/installing-virtualbox). I tried to configure KVM following the tutorial, but I stopped after bridging network interface, because it slows Trisquel booting to much. Any idea?
As for Transana, unfortunately, the research team I joined work on PDF files (text editable or not), ODT, DOCX et MS Excel files. It's too much trouble to convert all of this into compatible formats for Transana. Besides, my colleagues uses NVIVO "classification" a lot for demographic data about interview participants (and newspaper editorial's authors in my case) and review literature authors (https://youtu.be/Xe0NpJPLQ6k?t=51m39s). So far, I didn't see anything similar in Transana.
Have you tried Virt-manager ? (has always worked well for me) on 2GB of Ram
https://virt-manager.org/
Available in Trisquel repositary
+ enable/disable KVM/Qemu Daemon at startup
Mangy Dog, thank you. I tried to use KVM, but I can't make it working on my box.
Document formats: .doc vs .odt. (share, collaborate, review, coerrections etc) journals not accepting . odt or .tex
Network: only MS VPNs, no access to network; disk space, resources, printers etc
I have been *THIS* close to give up (on my work computer)
Ahh, I forgot: On my work computer I installed Mint due to issues like this
Transana is to my knowledge the only open source program that handles qualitative analysis at the highest level. It works with text, still, audio and video and manages up to four media files at a time.
I asked the developer about the chances that it'll come for Linux: He was not optimistic as it requires funding. He is most interested though, so if one of you have a rich uncle, please ask him to support libre qualitative analysis
There is already quite a lot of very good libre softwares for quantitative data analysis (R, Gephi, etc.). Unfortunately, qualitative data analysis is seems not to be as much popular amongst developers. Patientia!
free/libre. If somenone made the evaluation/review, and if it's really
in the Free Software Directory, or in some default repository of
free/libre system distributions, please tell me. It appears to me that
NVIVO is currently not free/libre because of the following text: "You
agree that you will not reverse engineer, decompile, or otherwise
attempt to access the source code of the Software. Unless the
accompanying license agreement expressly allows otherwise, any copying
or redistribution of the Software is strictly forbidden. This also
applies to any copying or reproduction of the Software to any other
server or location for further reproduction, redistribution or
use. Unauthorized use, reproduction or distribution of the Software is
illegal, and may result in severe civil and criminal
penalties. Offenders will be prosecuted to the maximum extent of the
law." (from [[http://www.qsrinternational.com/legal]]).
Based on this, you can:
a. Use someone else's computer to do the work, without installing any
non-(free/libre) software in the person's computer. The idea here
would be to do this with someone's computer that already has NVIVO
for some time. Also, while being required to use this person's
computer, it's a good idea to document how inpractical it was, and
later on send what was documented to QSR International so that they
can see how inconvenient the loss of the essential freedoms of the
software is. This is one of my recommendations.
b. Don't use NVIVO. Instead, use a free/libre one, like QualTA
([[https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/qualta]], note that this is a
random/untested suggestion, and that no other free/libre substitute
is known by be so far, I have tried to look on the Free Software
Directory, on the Parabola repository, on the Guix/GuixSD repository,
and also in Trisquel repository, but only found this one in GNU
Savannah). This is one of my recommendations.
c. Install QEMU and a system distribution that runs NVIVO with
QEMU. This option isn't recommended because it postpones the problems
related to the loss of the essential freedoms of the software, and
since you are one of the people affected by it, it'd be best if you
find (or hire) people to solve the problems, pressure the affected
organization that is using NVIVO to not use it (for example, pressure
the college in which you study to not use NVIVO, this can be done by
using a petition to collect signatures from students), or pressure
QSR International to completely free/liberate NVIVO (this last option
isn't guaranteed to work since for-profit organizations tend to
ignore our demands). We can help up to the QEMU part, and possible
QEMU-specific issues, but we cannot help with using the (probably
non-free) system distribution, and we cannot help on using NVIVO.
--
- [[https://libreplanet.org/wiki/User:Adfeno]]
- Palestrante e consultor sobre /software/ livre (não confundir com
gratis).
- "WhatsApp"? Ele não é livre, por isso não uso. Iguais a ele prefiro
GNU Ring, ou Tox. Quer outras formas de contato? Adicione o vCard
que está no endereço acima aos teus contatos.
- Pretende me enviar arquivos .doc, .ppt, .cdr, ou .mp3? OK, eu
aceito, mas não repasso. Entrego apenas em formatos favoráveis ao
/software/ livre. Favor entrar em contato em caso de dúvida.
Thank you Adfeno.
a. is not an option (as a figure of speech), as I really need this job. Terrible salary, not very interesting, but considering my limited skills and my family situation. I'd rather loose some of the freedom related to the use of Nvivo than to become a destitute man again :-)
b. to my knowledge, I may be wrong of course, there isn't any free software like Nvivo. At least not the softwares you mentioned. Thank you for your help though.
c. your help would be much appreciated. So ware I couldn't make Virtualbox or KVM working on my box as I mentioned previously.
I don't use QEMU that much (because I'm not to involved in things
related that need using it), but I think you can do like so (the "$ "
are indications that the following in the same line is a command):
1. Create a virtual machine with a maximum size of 1 GiB (qcow2 is way
superior than most others, and is also the native type supported by
QEMU):
$ qemu-img create -f qcow2 "vm.img" 1G
2. Do either one of the following (or both in order):
a. Run some system distribution image (assuming you want to do so in
order to install it in the "vm.img"):
$ qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 1024 -smp 1 -boot menu=on -drive file="any-system-distribution-image" -drive file="vm.img"
If `qemu-system-x86_64` doesn't exist or doesn't work, try others
such as `qemu-system-i686`. `-enable-kvm` (KVM support) depends on
whether the kernel of your copy of Trisquel currently uses has KVM
available. If KVM isn't supported, QEMU will tell you that either
when called with `--enable-kvm` or during execution by going to
the QEMU monitor (Ctrl + Alt + 2 or Ctrl + Alt + Shift + 2) and
typing `info kvm`).
b. Assuming you already have a system distribution installed in
"vm.img" and wants to use it, run:
$ qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 1024 -smp 1 -boot menu=on -drive file="vm.img"
We do not "help" users harm their own freedoms here. NVivo's website is pure marketing bullshit and I have little idea of what the tool actually does. Do you analyze texts? If so, you could try the KNIME Analytics Platform, which as nodes for text analytics: http://www.knime.org/nodeguide/other-analytics-types/text-processing
I generally agree that
We do not "help" users harm their own freedoms
But OP has a job in research where thecolleagues uses NVIVO
Now, apparently OP only has one computer and would
rather keep my Trisquel and virtualise OSX or Windows than switching to OSX or Windows completely
I think we are doing good in helping out.
Working with research myself, I know how hard it is to be a libre software idealist.
Thank you GNUbahn. As you said, it is very difficult to work as a libre software idealist. At least, this is how I felt since I've started being a researcher in 2006.
Magic Banana, thanks for mentioning KNIME. It looks very different and oriented on data mining.
Here is what I would need for this project in sociology. We have to analyse thousands of sources (documents) produced mainly by or on journalists : videos, editorials, audio interviews with transcripts. Formats are PDFs (text editable or not), plain text, docx, odt, ods, ogg. Part of the analysis is done by "coding", which is how Qualitative data analysis approach calls the process of manually associating a keyword to a part of the source, few seconds of a video interview, some words or a paragraph of a press article, a certain area of a picture, a raw or a table in Libreoffice Cal. The process of coding sources must be documented. So during the coding process, analyst write memos. Sources, memos are shared amongst analysts. Beside coding and documenting the coding, a database of all the authors of sources (mostly journalists) analysed is created and completed with demographic data : name, birth date, employer, family members, studies, etc. By doing so, analysis can take into account relation between sources and certain properties of their authors and try to find patterns. Once all the data have been coded, we need a tool to create queries and a tool to visualize results of those queries.
Indeed, Nvivo website is full of marketing bullshit, as lots of official websites of software editors are. They're might not be the best places to learn about a software. Nonetheless, as you can see elsewhere (for instance here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe0NpJPLQ6k and here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YyVySrV2cM), what's fantastic with Nvivo or other softwares of this type (Atlas.ti, MAXQDA, etc.) is that everything the whole qualitative data analysis workflow can be done in a very intuitive way without any "programming" skill.
Perhaps QualTA can cover some of the text analysis. I never used it
though, I only assume that QualTA is somewhat helpful because it has
goals to make text analysis in GNU Emacs.