Off-screen coding you may prefer to do coding on paper away from the computer. It is straightforward to obtain a paper copy of all or part of an imported document (this is referred to as a report in NUD*IST speak). The report should have line numbers, which will make it easy to tell NUD*IST what text units to code at which nodes. All that is needed is to mark up codes against text units on the page. On returning to NUD*IST, you tell it the coding for each of the text units, indicating where each node fits into the tree structure, or leaving it as a free node. The same procedure is of course used with external documents which have not been imported into the program.
It is advisable to play about with the two types of coding, possibly treating the same document in both ways. Some people find actually doing it on the computer screen inhibits creativity and playfulness, and the paper report less daunting. Other feel just the reverse.
Text searches A further way in which NUD*IST can foster the process of linking the document and index systems and of developing ideas from the data, is by the use of a variety of searches of documents. Text searches look for strings or patterns of characters. A string search simply finds every text unit in which a particular sequence of characters occurs, usually a word (e.g. ‘age’) or phrase (e.g. ‘bogus asylum seeker’). Various restrictions can be placed on the search which can help to make it more likely that the ‘hits’ are linked to a particular concept (e.g. selecting ‘whole word or phrase only’ cuts out ‘page’, ‘outrage’, etc. from the ‘age’ search). Searches can also be restricted to nodes. Pattern searches go for patterns or combinations of characters rather than the exact match of a string search. Typical examples include searches for words with similar meaning (e.g. ‘help’ and ‘assistance’) and different forms of a word (e.g. ‘help’, ‘helped’, ‘helping’)