FLARES is an online application developed under the R statistical software environment. Using the shiny package developed by rStudio, FLARES is a user-friendly and interactive application designed for the analyses of free-lists.
Free-listing is a data collection task which was elaborated in the field of cognitive psychology in order to better understand the processes of semantic categorization. Its use has become widespread in the fields of cognitive anthropology, ethnobiology and socio-ecological studies. It is an elicitation technique by which informants are asked to cite – in written or oral form – all the items belonging to a specific super-ordinate semantic category (or cultural domain). A typical question engaging such an elicitation would be: “ Cite, as they come to mind, all the insects that you know of.”
The aim of the technique is twofold. First, it allows to establish the list of items belonging to a domain and to define its semantic boundaries. Second, the frequency with which items are cited across lists as well as their order of mention within lists provide information concerning the domain’s structure. In fact, the most frequently cited items appearing early in the lists are considered to be culturally more salient than others; in a nutshell, they are considered more typical – better prototypes – of the domain under investigation.
The technique’s main assets are the ease and rapidity with which it can be carried out and that it is conveniently replicable in different cultural contexts. Free-listing is a swift and efficient technique to uncover, in a systematic fashion, the basic structure of any cultural domain to which researchers are generally unfamiliar at the onset of their survey.
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FLARES was developed to overcome some of the limitations of its direct ancestor FLAME which is a set of VBA macros running under Microsoft Excel. While maintaining the same philosophy – making free-list analysis as user-friendly as possible – FLARES is now accessible from any operating system and does not require the use of any proprietary software. You just need a web browser.
Furthermore, FLARES benefits from the computational power of R and integrates a set of statistical analyses which were not accessible within FLAME. It also includes new analyses which, until now, were not offered by any other software or package dedicated to free-list analyses (see Item Category Analyses below).
Some of FLARES main capabilities are illustrated below.
