METIS: A Heuristic Sociological Environment for Interpretive Qualitative Analysis

METIS is a heuristic sociological environment for the interpretive analysis of qualitative corpora. It is designed as an epistemic accompaniment device for qualitative social research, especially in the study of gender, inequalities, affects, identities and relational configurations. METIS does not replace interpretation or make substantive decisions on behalf of the researcher. Its design principle is that the system proposes indications, questions and working hypotheses, while interpretive judgment remains with the researcher. The environment supports the formulation of research problems, corpus construction, interpretive analysis, thematic and case-based analysis, manual coding, reflexive writing, validity and rigor checks, ethical and data-management procedures, and the generation of reproducible audit trails. Its analytical architecture includes weighted lexical matching, explicit and auditable rules, contextualized frequency analysis, discourse and conversational analysis, metaphor analysis, network and community analysis, negative-case detection, situated reflexivity, overinterpretation checks and reproducible identifiers. METIS follows a local-first and deterministic design. Qualitative corpora are processed on the researcher’s own computer and are not transmitted to external services. The same input and analytical configuration produce the same output, supporting transparency, confirmability and methodological reproducibility. The materials deposited here document the methodological architecture, analytical workflow, design principles and visual interfaces of METIS version 2.4. Author: Víctor Hugo Pérez-GalloORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1452-2531Affiliation: Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain