Today we have some news from the French and from the most beautifull city in the world. The software Sonal is not quite new but it was only recently that somebody recommended Sonal to me at researchgate.net. There is no information yet in English or German and it also seems that the software itself is purely in French:
“Sonal est un logiciel gratuit et innovant de retranscription d’entretiens. Il permet de facilement retranscrire, catégoriser et analyser vos interviews, directement à partir de vos fichiers audio.“
Interview RE-transcription is the keyword. We couldn’t find it in English and thus tried to translate it with transcript analysis. We therefore grouped Sonal under Qualitative Data Analysis. On their website there is a video presenting their software in a short. Even without French language knowledge you can grasp a good sense of what you can do with the software. Overall it looks quite colourful. We tried to run it here in a virtual Windows 7 machine but we didn’t succeed yet. If there is anybody out there how ever worked with Sonal, we would be happy to get some case studies or reports on it. After all, it seems to be a very interesting project. the software is freely available and the source will be published soon (!?) under a open source licence.