DNA 3.0.9

TL;DR

The most important new functions are categorical qualifier variables, local document search, and new rDNA functions for networks, attributes, and barplots.

Important bug fixes include the batch document importer and the multi-statement editor.

The sample.dna database still has the password sample. The next release will have more R functions for data management.

Installation instructions and requirements are the same as for v3.0.7.

New features and bug fixes

• Added categorical qualifier variables: In the network export (both in DNA and rDNA), it is now possible to use qualifier variables that are not boolean/binary or integer, but short text. For example, if you use the statement type for NPF Story Elements, you can connect two narrators or a narrator with a hero etc not just by co-occurrence in the same statement, but for instance only if they have the same value in another variable like "plot" or "villain" (the short text qualifier variable).
• Added a document filter and a short-cut to the global search function. In the DNA main window, you can now simply press CTRL+F if a database is open to show the text search function. If you select one or more documents in the table before you open the search window, you can check a box for displaying only those search results that are in the contained in the documents selected in the document table. I.e., you can turn your search into a within-document search. See also #252.
• New export defaults: Both in DNA and rDNA, I have set up the same sensible default parameter values for network export.
• Fixed bugs in the batch document importer. In particular, the parsed date was not saved properly in the imported documents and was replaced by the date and time of import instead, and the default regex terms for parsing meta data from file names did not correspond to the ones in DNA 2. The date issue has been fixed, and the regex terms have been replaced with more useful defaults. See #239 for details. However, after thinking about this more, I generally recommend using file names of the form [title: some title] [author: some author] [section: some section].txt (and similar structures for other meta data). These are easy to parse using regex terms, for example (?<=\[title: ).+?(?=\]) for matching the title, (?<=\[author: ).+?(?=\]) for matching the author, and (?<=\[section: ).+?(?=\]) for matching the section. In any case, the batch import of documents should work well now.
• Bug fix in the multiple statement editor: In the right-click context menu of the statement table, the function for editing multiple statements (i.e., recoding them at once) only worked with the default statement types but produced an error if custom statement types were used. This has been fixed. See #240.
• Fixed an export bug: If the time window functionality in the network export was used and at least one of the time slices did not have any statements occurring, an error was thrown instead of producing an empty network.
• Fixed an export bug with normalization: When normalization was used, zeros in the output file were replaced by NaN. They are now proper zeros.
• The dna_network function has been added to rDNA again. It is now possible to create networks from the R console and retrieve them as matrices just like with the graphical network export in DNA. The resulting network objects have distinct class names for one- and two-mode networks, but are in essence matrix objects (just with additional attributes) and can be treated as such in R. There are as.matrix methods to cast these objects into proper matrix objects. The objects also come with print methods for pretty printing on the console. There is no plotting method yet for these objects. We aim to add this in the next release. But it is of course possible to use any network visualization package to display the data, for example the network, ggraph, or igraph packages.
• Added fancy progress bars to several functions in rDNA.
• Added a dna_barplot function to rDNA. The new function creates data necessary for creating barplots like in Leifeld and Haunss (2012, EJPR), Fergie et al. (2019, Addiction) and in some other papers. The data are saved in a dna_barplot object, which is just a data.frame with added attributes and can be treated as such. There is a fancy print method to display it nicely on the R console. The user can print and/or edit the data and then use the autoplot method to create the actual diagram, with several options. This approach should give the user the greatest flexibility to change the data or create custom plots with the data.
• Added a dna_getAttributes function to rDNA to retrieve all entities and their attribute values and colors from the DNA database. The resulting object is a dna_attributes object, but it is simply a data.frame (just with some additional attributes) and can be treated as such in R. In the future, we will add functions to edit entities and attributes in the database from R.
• Several other bug fixes. See commit history on GitHub for details.

Further release notes

Please view the installation instructions and requirements for release version 3.0.7 for more details.

Like in previous versions, the password for all coders in the sample database is "sample".

We are aiming to release the next version 3.0.10 in mid to late February 2023, with new rDNA functions for data management in R and some new analysis functions.