HyperRESEARCH

History

Up until the 1990s, software that dealt with textual data, of which the earliest was General Inquirer, focused on quantitative analysis and provided tools like keyword in context and concordance generation to support a content analysis of the data. In the early 1990s, teams of academicians and programmers from several European countries, Australia, and North America began developing a new type of software for textual analysis that, following the networking activities undertaken by Nigel Fielding and Raymond Lee, came to be known as computer assisted qualitative data analysis (CAQDAS) programs. These programs drew their inspiration from writers such as Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, and Patricia Hentz Becker, who tried to formulate clear guidelines about how a qualitative analysis of data should be undertaken. A key to this was the idea of coding data, that is, assigning tags or code names to passages of text (or other segments of data). After developing a number of codes and applying them to the data by coding it, the researcher would retrieve all data coded to each code in turn and analyze it by identifying key ideas, patterns, and concepts in it. Many of the programs written in the early 1990s supported these code and retrieve functions. Soon, some [Page 800]started to develop further functionalities to help the researcher. Many of these focused on developing the idea of retrievals in more complex ways by, for example, linking together one set of coding with others in a variety of logical ways. These programs became known as theory builders.

HyperRESEARCH was one of the earliest programs of the theory builder type when it was developed in 1990 by Sharlene Hesse-Biber, T. Scott Kinder, and Paul Dupuis. In 1991, they incorporated a company, Researchware, to sell, develop, and market the program. Most software at the time was designed to run under MS-DOS on PCs, but some ran on a Macintosh and some (such as HyperRESEARCH and NUD.IST) ran on both a Macintosh and PC. Unlike most programs that soon supported only Windows versions, HyperRESEARCH has always been available in almost identical Windows and Macintosh versions. It is now developed using a programming language called Transcript (on the LiveCode software platform) that provides cross-platform development across Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Web, and various mobile operating systems, and it appears that it will maintain the program’s multiplatform support.

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