411 ware contributes to it.

In the introduction to simple regression, it is

correctly noted that it is important to view the relationship be-
tween independent and dependent variables. However, the author
then says that the &dquo;quickest way to see whether a relationship is
linear is to plot the x and y variables on graph paper.&dquo; This would
have been a wonderful opportunity to use spreadsheet software to
plot the variables. It would reinforce the idea that computers can
speed up the analysis of data.
Also, why not use real data in the examples. Since this tutorial is
designed to refresh the student’s memory, real data would have pro-
vided better illustrations.
At the end of the tutorial, the author notes that sophisticated sta-
tistical software offers a way to calculate the results for more com-
plex data and it is important to understand the rules and know
which statistical tools to use before attempting to solve problems.
This is true. However, sophisticated statistical software packages
offer so many options that it would have been more desirable to
work with that software and learn about those options. My major
complaint is that vos software is so narrow that its value is limited.
(Reviewed by Nicholas Karatjas, Indiana University of Penn-
sylvania)

HyperResearch and NUDIST

HyperResearch
Publisher: Researchware, POB 1258, Randolph, MA 02368-1258; 617-
961-3909 ; E-mail PAUL@BCVMS.BITNET
Year of Publication: 1991
Version Reviewed: 1.32
Materials: i 3.5&dquo; diskette, 128-page user’s manual
Price: $175
Machine Specificity: Macintosh
System Requirements: (2MB strongly recommended), sys-
IMB RAM
tem version 6.0 or later, HyperCard version 1.2 or later, hard disk
Effectiveness: Good
User-Friendliness: Very Good
Documentation: Good

NUDIST (Non-numerical Unstructured Data Indexing, Searching,

and Theorizing)
Publisher: Applied Computing Research Institute, La Trobe Univer-
sity, Bundoora, Vic 3083, Australia; 011-61-3-479-1311; FAX 011-61-3-
470-4915; E-mail NUDIST@LATAI.LAT.OZ.AU
Year of Publication: 1991
Version Reviewed: 2.2
Materials: i 3.5&dquo; diskette includes program with bundled mini-
version of Procyon LISP and demo data file, 221-page manual for

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412 mainframe NUDIST (which is to be used also for Macintosh version),
23-page manual for installing Macintosh NUDIST
Price: Stand-alone, $250 (Australian); networked, $1,000 (Austra-
lian) ; site license to be
negotiated
Machine Specificity: Macintosh
System Requirements: 2MB free RAM, system version 6.0 or later,
finder version 6.1.3 or later, hard disk
Effectiveness: Good
User-Friendliness: Fair
Documentation: Good
Summary: HyperResearch 1.32 and NUDIST 2.2 are programs that
systematically aid researchers in organizing, indexing, searching,
and ultimately theorizing on large textual or other &dquo;qualitative&dquo;
data sets. They differ in the way they assist researchers with the
tasks.
Social scientists, especially anthropologists and historians, have
long been struggling with vast quantities of unstructured data. The
difficulty of processing this type of information systematically has
led to criticism of their work as being less rigorous and less suscep-
tible to peer review, hence &dquo;unscientific.&dquo; HyperResearch and NUD-
IST attempt to address these difficulties. Both programs are designed
to enable researchers to organize, code or index, retrieve and display
disparate textual materials. With HyperCard’s multimedia capabil-
ity, HyperResearch is further aimed at additionally providing these
capabilities for audio, video, and photographic documents. (For a list
of audio and video equipment supported, contact the publisher.)/
NUDIST allows researchers to enter indexes for offline objects.

By greatly reducing the burden of organizing, indexing, and re-

trieving documents and other materials, these programs enable the
researcher to (i)concentrate more on conceptual aspects of the re-
search, (2) feel freer to include as much material as necessary, and
(3) review and revise conceptualization, coding schemes, and re-
search designs without having to &dquo;restart from scratch.&dquo; Materials
stored in these systems can also be more easily accessed and manip-
ulated by other researchers in peer review or in secondary analyses.
Of course, HyperResearch and NUDIST are not the only, nor the
first, programs that can assist researchers in coding, indexing, and
organizing large textual data sets. The General Inquirer (developed
by Philip Stone and his associates at Cambridge) was an early and
very ambitious program for automated coding of concepts within
text. Textpack (developed by Cornelia Zuell at Zentrum fuer Um-
fragen, Methoden and Analysen e.V., Mannheim, Germany) can rep-
resent the documents in Key-Word-In-Context format, count the
words contained in the documents, and make the statistics avail-
able for content analysis or other statistical analyses. Ethnograph
(from Qualis Research Associates in Littleton, co) is more compa-
rable to NUDIST and HyperResearch in that it also assists research-

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413 ers in coding and retrieving textual data such as field notes. In ad-
dition to these specialized programs, researchers have developed
many ingenious techniques using various combinations of word
processors with searching, sorting, indexing, and outlining capabil-
ities ; standard database programs; Key-Word-In-Context display
programs; and statistical packages.
HyperResearch and NUDIST are welcomed new tools for qualita-
tive research. In coding, indexing, and organizing textual data they
are more systematic and more sophisticated than some of the other

programs mentioned. To our knowledge, they are also the first such
programs running on the Macintosh.
Whereas HyperResearch is a Macintosh HyperCard-based pro-
gram, NUDIST runs on several platforms. It operates under various
versions of LISP on different computers-Procyon Common LISP on
Macintosh, DEC Common LISP on DEC VAX/VMS, and other LISPS in a
wide range of UNIx machines such as CDC Cyber, Sun, Decstation,
HP, NexT, and IBM PS/2. The vendor is now working on a Pc version
of NUDIST.
The programs differ in the way they assist researchers to code,
index, analyze, and reflect on their data set. HyperResearch allows
users to browse text documents electronically, highlighting and
coding any portion of the materials as they go. Codes can also be
applied &dquo;automatically&dquo; to all occurrences of a term within the doc-
ument. With HyperResearch, researchers can then go on to build
&dquo;super codes&dquo; as Boolean combinations of the codes, identify docu-
ments containing any Boolean combination of the codes or super
codes, and retrieve and display coded materials in the context of
surrounding text. The manual gives examples of using treelike su-
per codes to test hypotheses about occurrence of patterns of attri-
butes in the sample documents. The process typically generates a
better understanding of the materials, and the program allows its
users to easily change coding schema to reflect those new under-

standings. With HyperResearch, the researchers can work as if he

or she were working on a piece of paper.
NUDIST enables researchers to systematically construct tree-
structured indexes, in contrast to HyperResearch’s basically &dquo;flat&dquo;
indexes. NUDIST provides more sophisticated operators to build
upon the indexes than HyperResearch’s Boolean operators. To help
organize the materials, NUDIST also allows researchers to attach
free-form notes to either the documents or the indexes as they are
added. NUDIST, however, can take only a line or a paragraph as a
basic unit for codes. Placement of hard returns within the docu-
ment controls what constitutes a coding unit, but this might be in-
convenient, and the appearance of the document on screen or page
may be unsatisfactory. Generally one has to print the materials off-
line with line numbers on the side (using utilities provided in the
program) before trying to code the text. When retrieving the coded

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414 materials,users can display only the particular lines or paragraphs
selected.
Another difference between HyperResearch and NUDIST is that
whereas HyperResearch can accommodate only one user at a time,
versions of NUDIST can be used in a multi-user mode on a net-
worked or shared mainframe environment. A centralized control as
to who has access to which part of the program or database is then
provided.
NUDIST indicates no limit on size or number of files. Hyper-
Research also indicates no limit on size of files but does require
insertion of a tilde (-) to break a file into segments of 16,000 or fewer
characters. We have no indication whether there is a limit on the
number of files HyperResearch can process as a single project. As
far as the speed of the programs is concerned, we found both to be
satisfactory when working with the small (1-4K for HyperResearch
and 4-8x for NUDIST) demo files that came with the programs. We
were not able to test NUDIST with a bigger file because we were

working only with their demo version. When we tested Hyper-

Research with a 400K file, however, it took it about io minutes to
code the file automatically. Our testing was done on a Macintosh
SE with 2MB RAM running system 6.0.5. We believe that the sizes
and numbers of files that you can comfortably work with will-for
some time-be governed as much by the size and speed of your
Macintosh as by the capacities of either program.
It took us quite a long time to &dquo;get going&dquo; with each of the pro-
grams. Once we received the complete packages and documenta-
tion as currently distributed, however, our problems were cleared
up and we were operational. There were still some ambiguities and
oversights in the documentation, but phone calls to the vendors in-
dicated that our educated guesses had been correct on all points
noted. The current documentation seems adequate, but we believe
both programs could make better use of Macintosh menu-driven
help facilities.
Current development efforts at Researchware are aimed at pro-
ducing an improved stand-alone version of its program (neither
HyperCard nor SuperCard will be required). They are also working
on a MicrosoftWindows version of HyperResearch farther down the
road. The folks at LaTrobe are giving priority to a Pc version of
NUDIST, but we were glad to leam that upgrades of the Macintosh
version (with improved display formats and capabilities) and a re-
write of the manual are also on their docket.
Our own major interest in concept-coding programs is for statis-
tical content analysis of text documents. We look for the ability of
a program to generate counts of occurrence of code-terms or con-

cepts within sets of documents or document parts-counts that

could later be input to a statistical analysis package. While neither
program is designed with these objectives in mind, both provide
some features that could be helpful in this. For instance, NUDIST

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415 provides context-sensitive search procedure that provides statis-
a
tics on finds; this can be run across sets of documents. Gener-
its
ally, however, for these functions we would still transfer our docu-
ments to another platform and run the Textpack program.
In conclusion, whereas HyperResearch is easier and more natural
to use, NUDIST is more structured and more sophisticated. Hyper-
Research does very well as a natural, unassuming &dquo;clerical&dquo; aid that
frees researchers to concentrate on more &dquo;creative&dquo; work. NUDIST,
on the other hand, fares less satisfactorily in the basic code-and-
retrieve but assists researchers more directly with the &dquo;creative the-
orizing&dquo; aspects of the research. The &dquo;theory&dquo; in question, however,
must be adaptable to its treelike structure, as opposed, for instance,
to a network type of structure. NUDIST’s authors, Tom Richards and
Lyn Richards, did indicate they are working to improve its code-
and-retrieve capabilities. They also have made major contributions
in their critical analysis of the methodological underpinnings of the
tasks to be accomplished. Continued dialogue on these issues will
enhance future efforts of all developers in this field. (Reviewed by
Chi-hsein Wang and Philip S. Sidel, University of Pittsburgh)

Microsoft Bookshelf for Windows

Publisher: Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way, Redmond,
CA 98052; 800-426-9400
Year of Publication: 1991
Version Reviewed: i.o
Materials: CD-ROM disk, instruction manual
Price: $195
Machine Specificity: IBM-compatible 80286 (> 10 MHZ), 80386, or
80486 computer
System Requirements: 30MB hard disk, 2MB RAM, CD-ROM drive,
VGA or Super-VGA monitor, audio board (Creative Labs’ Sound
Blaster or Media Vision’s Pro Audio Spectrum), mouse, and head-
phone or speakers; Microsoft Windows 3.0 or later, Microsoft Mul-
timedia Extensions 1.0 or later, Microsoft CD-ROM Extensions 2.2 or
later, and MS-DOS 3.1or later
Effectiveness: Excellent
User-Friendliness: Excellent
Documentation: Good
Summary: This comprehensive multimedia reference work in-
cludes the Hammond World Atlas, Roget’s Thesaurus, the Ameri-
can Heritage Dictionary, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, the Con-
cise Columbia Encyclopedia, the Concise Columbia Dictionary of
Quotations, and the World Almanac and Book of Facts. Besides
text, pictures, and maps, the program provides a number of ani-
mated and audio clips. The design of this software allows easy

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