Graph editors are very useful for qualitative research. As part of my ongoing engagement with visualising qualitative relationships between materials and actors during the analysis of ethnographic data, I repeatedly stumbled upon so-called graph editors. These are software programmes used by graph theorists, amongst others. In short, graph editors are able to design layouts of nodes (entities) and edges (relations).
for more information see the blog post at http://www.ems-research.org/content/graph-editor-usage-gephi-tams
During the last month I have been scanning field notes, covering two and a half months of field work, for all kinds of categories, emerging in the field. I came up with a huge map of codes and how they are linked. Of great help for this work was the TAMS Analyser, i.e. the software called "Text Analysis Markup System" available from http://tamsys.sourceforge.net/.
This is part of my coding system which I use to make sense of the field notes which I take every day at my ethnographic field work.
