| Sumario: | Part of a special section on social science communities and the diffusion of a new technological development called Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS). The writers present an overview of the use of qualitative software in Canada, stressing its distinctive features in relation to other countries. They deal with facts regarding textual data computing in the Canadian context before considering two software packages—SATO and TACT—that originated in Canada and that embody a lexical, or word-based, approach to textual analysis. They briefly discuss other software tools that are designed to achieve the automatic syntactic and semantic description of texts. Finally, they consider conceptual problems and challenges that arise from the use of computers by sociologists and other social scientists interested in the study of natural language sources.
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