Guided Tour - Introduction
by David K. Woods, Ph.D.

This guided tour of Transana is designed to show what the Transana software can do and demonstrate how researchers could approach qualitative analysis using Transana.  If you want to learn HOW to do the things shown here, take a look at the Tutorial, which is distributed with Transana and is available from the Help menu, and look at the ScreenCasts on the Documentation page of the Transana Web Site. 

This version of the guided tour, last edited in October, 2009, is based on Transana version 2.40.

Transana is a program designed to facilitate the transcription and qualitative analysis of video and audio data.

Qualitative analysis can be performed in many different ways using many different theoretical approaches, so Transana provides tools that can be used for many different types of analysis.  Therefore, this guided tour describes Transana in functional terms, showing the sorts of analytic activities the program facilitates, rather than in theoretical terms.  The task of mapping Transana's functionality to a particular analytic approach is left to the reader.

This guided tour describes four major areas of analytic activity: transcription, clip creation, coding, and writing analytic memos.  The guided tour will finish with a discussion of collaboration support within Transana.