RE: Sociological Data Analysis with Emacs?

[Drew Adams]

> Lisp alone could get you a long way, if you're comfortable with it.
> If all you are doing is applying tags (i.e. an open-ended set of
> categories) to spans of text, you need something that stores
> structures like '(filename start end tag) [for text in FILENAME
> from point START to point END, tag it with TAG]. You could use
> completion functions to enter the tag, to remind you of what you've
> already used. This assumes the source texts are immutable, of
> course, otherwise start and end become unreliable.

Sorry, I have no idea what this is all about, but your description makes me
think that Icicles tagged regions might help. They are a persistent set of
named start and end locations, together with buffer names (which can be
filenames). And you can use completion with them.
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/Icicles_-_Multiple_Regions.