Organizing and Analyzing Mounds of Research Text?

Andrew Green asks: "Four years ago, I stopped working on my Master's thesis in Social Anthropology. Now, I'm getting back to it again, and I find there's a _lot_ of text to deal with. I have a 350-page field diary, a dozen transcripts of recorded interviews, lists of books and articles, extensive notes about the books and articles, and the books and articles themselves in dead-tree or electronic format. I want to organize _all_ of it. I need to keep track of all the different text files on my computer (most are in MS formats, though I now use GNU/Linux), which ideally means keeping personalized sets of metadata about each file, linking files to other files and to entries in bibliography lists, and having some sort of version control. I'd also like to be able to do a free-text search on all texts on my local hard drive. And, most important of all, I need to build a hierarchical list of topics that are relevant to my thesis and relate specific sections of all these texts (not just whole files) to different topics. Any ideas? I know there are proprietary solutions out there, but I don't want to use them. What free applications can best deal with some or all of my needs? Would I be better off building something myself?"

Comments

Try TWiki

[Demosthenex]

TWiki has many of the features you mentioned, and is a web based app that you could publish with later. ;]

http://www.twiki.org/

keeping personalized sets of metadata about each file, linking files to other files and to entries in bibliography lists, and having some sort of version control.

Each TWiki page can have custom searchable metadata in forms. Pages are linked to other pages by WikiWords. Version control and access lists are on every page.

I'd also like to be able to do a free-text search ... I need to build a hierarchical list of topics that are relevant to my thesis and relate specific sections of all these texts

Text searching is integrated. You can arrange TWiki pages into hierarchies with parent topic, and there is automatic crossreferencing.

TWiki uses a pure text format with some simple markup, *bold* for example. HTML can be used as well.

I'd suggest you check it out. No database required.

Demo

3 ring binder anyone?

[foniksonik]

Well it's not exactly opensource or even software but for your one time purpose you might consider just categorizing your data into sections and putting it in to one or multiple 3-Ring binders with subdividers w/ little tabs on them for easy lookup.

After that you will have a great start on digitizing the whole thing if you still feel like it later (presumably after you've actually gone ahead and written your paper).

Seriously, why take all the time to digitize this stuff when you're only going to use it once in your life as reference. When and if you get to publish it later you can spend the time inputting or maybe even hire someone to do it for you.