We seek expert help for continued development of PC-ACE (Program for Computer-Assisted Coding of Events) a freeware academic software designed to carry out a specific type of social-science textual analysis: Quantitative Narrative Analysis (see www.pc-ace.com). PC-ACE is an application of Microsoft Office ACCESS. The ideal candidate will have had some familiarity with relational database design, MS ACCESS, and VBA. Detailed job descriptions for each development task will be provided. Interested candidates should get in touch with Prof Roberto Franzosi at rfranzo@emory.edu.

PC-ACE is a relational database composed of some 40 fully normalized tables and over 80,000 lines of VBA code. In fact, it is not just one database, but a set of four inter-related databases: pc-ace.accdb, the “frontend,” the data.mde and userlog.mde “backends” where data are stored; and the help.mde database that contains all the information displayed in the online help (still under development). The data.mde database stores the data collected from a set of documents and userlog.mde stores information about PC-ACE users (login and logout times, the type of work carried out in PC-ACE during each session, etc.).

PC-ACE offers a variety of tools for the storage and retrieval of large bodies of text in a database environment in the complex structure of a “story grammar,” where a story grammar is the set of Subject-Verb-Object and respective modifiers. In narrative, the Subject is typically a social actor (individual, group, organization), the verb is an action, and the object is either a social actor, a physical object, or an abstract object. Typical modifiers are the time and space of action, its reasons and outcomes, the name, sex, race, etc. of social actors.

PC-ACE does NOT perform AUTOMATCALLY any parsing of narrative information into the categories of a story grammar. All information must be entered manually in text/combo boxes from a set of input documents, albeit with the help of a number of tools to make the task easy and efficient. PC-ACE, however, does provide several routines for the automatic analysis of textual data in different software (e.g., network models in Gephi, GIS maps in Google Earth or QGIS).

e-mail rfranzo@emory.edu

Webpages http://www.sociology.emory.edu/rfranzosi/Index.html