I completely agree with you! And yes, I think LiquidText does more than comparisons. Although I haven’t tried it personally, from what I saw in the video tutorials provided by the website, it seems that LiquidText can do memo-writing and stuff like that.
I’m glad you mentioned Grounded Theory, which is one of the key theories in qualitative research. I don’t know if someone has ever talked about the similar thing before: I think when we do reading, especially scientific reading, we are actually doing something pretty similar to Grounded Theory. That is, at the first step, we collect relevant papers/data; then we constantly compare concepts from the papers/data; we sensitize concepts, write memos, reflect, etc. until our own provisional theory is saturated; finally, the ultimate theory is established.
Since doing scientific reading and notetaking is a qualitative process, I think a computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) would reach at its finest. If you remember what I posted in another thread, I recommended a QDA software called MAXQDA. This software certainly fits the fourth level reading. That’s why I’m using it for my whole literature reading, quotation, ordering, memo-writing, etc.