The manual evaluation of qualitative data is an integral part in the set of methods of empirical social science research in various disciplines. Since the availability of increasingly large amounts of digital or retro-digitized text, there has also been a growing interest in the evaluation of large amounts of text using computer-assisted methods.

iLCM is based on a previous software prototype developed in the research project ePol. Furthermore, the iLCM infrastructure integrates a fully functional script environment. This allows researchers to process data structures, which where extracted, imported and processed by the generic components of the iLCM with highly individualized scripts that fully fulfill the requirements of their research tasks. As a consequence, different strategies to analyze data are available. On the one hand the iLCM follows the idea of a generic solution, whereby social scientist can work in a state of the art environment with highly flexible algorithms available. But on the other hand, experienced users can implement and manipulate the methods of data analysis by using the integrated scripting functions of the iLCM.