Go to ‘Coding Schemas’ in the ‘Coding’ dropdown menu, and there click on ‘New schema’ to create a new coding scheme.
First, give the schema a name and a description, and choose whether it is an article- or unitschema. The default coding scheme is a unitschema, for sentence level codings. If you want to make coding scheme for article level codings, tick the box for ‘Isarticleschema’.
If you want to use a highlighter, select both the highlighter and the highlight language. If the codingschema does not use highlighting, select any highlight language.
Click on Submit, and in the next screen on ‘Edit fields’ to start adding variables to the new coding scheme.
This opens the codingschema editor.
Click on ‘Add field’ to add a new variable. Doubleclick on a cell, for example the cell ‘New Field (0)’ above, to change its contents. Press ‘tab’ to jump to the next cell in the table.
In the codingschema editor:
• Label is the label of the variable that coders see in the annotator, for example ‘Topic’.
• If a variable is Required, coders cannot finish coding the article in the Annotator without entering a value for this variable.
• Fieldtype is the type of variable. AmCAT uses the following variable types:
o Text: coders can enter text freely
o Number: coders can enter numbers freely
o Codebook: coders can choose from predefined answer categories
o Yes/no: this type of variable appears as a box that coders can tick or leave empty
o Quality: a numerical variable with the values -1, -0.5, 0, 0.5 and 1.
• Codebook has to be defined when the variable type is codebook. A codebook in AmCAT is a list of answer categories (learn how to create codebooks). In the codebook column, you select which codebook you use for this particular variable.
• Clicking on the red garbage bin icon removes a variable from the list.
• Save, and your codingschema is done. You can always edit a codingschema later. Schemas for article codings and for sentence codings are created in the same way.
AmCAT