Yoshikoder

This year the American Political Science Association meeting was in Philadelphia. The Yoshikoder went too, under cover of a Content Analysis working group organized by the irrepressible Stephen Purpura.

Attendees were asked for a short presentation, and a brief document covering either the content analysis methods they were developing, or the research problem they thought might benefit. I took the opportunity to write 4 pages on the Yoshikoder. You might find them useful. In particular, there’s motivation for, description of, and a guide to interpreting the relative risk ratios that the new statistical comparison report provides.

There’s plenty to be said about the other methods we heard about at the workshop, but I’ll save those for another entry.

The Yoshikoder currently has its tray tables stowed and its seats in the upright position, ready for the move to sourceforge, an open-source project hosting site. You shouldn’t feel much difference: hopefully not much more than a change in the process for downloading new versions.

Famous last words…

Some of you may be using Laver and Garry’s policy positions dictionary, available from the resources page. This is a dictionary of english-language political terms designed to capture issue content in party manifestos. After some investigation it appears there were actually two different versions of this dictionary floating about the academic end of the web. And it seems that the one I translated for the Yoshikoder was not the one used in the final article.

Tush.

I’ve unlinked the old one and added LaverGarryAJPS.ykd to the page. Thanks to John Garry for sorting out which was which. Practically speaking, they’ve much the same content, but the real one is smaller.

Although it may not look like it, there’s a fresh preview of 0.6.3 for download. This should fix two issues:

In the first, folk were running out of memory with large projects. The new preview allows, but does not require, 256M of RAM to be used by the program. This is four times as much as before, but comfortable in the context of most machines’ specifications I hope.

The second issue is the notorious ‘Already running’ problem that usually appeared after a sudden program shutdown. That shouldn’t happen now.