Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Thinkful and Uses for Digital Data in Research

I have come across a new resource called Thinkful. I found out about it through the AERA listserv. Here's the email I received explaining what it is:

Hello fellow grad students,
My name is June Ahn and I am a PhD student at the University of Southern California. I've been working on a personal project called thinkful.info (www.thinkful.info) to help me find new articles and books on my research interests. The website takes your keywords, and once a week searches hundreds of top academic journals and Amazon. You get a weekly email of the latest research and books that might be relevant to your areas of interest.... hopefully it will be a simple way to keep abreast of the latest work that is being published, which I find to be one challenge of academia.

I thought that this seemed relevant to our digital tools class, so I wanted to post it here. In addition, as I was reading an article for my social foundations course this week, I was directed to this website: http://www.talkinglongterm.co.uk/database/index.php
It, too, seemed relevant to this course as it shows how digital data can be used as part of a research project (in this case narrative accounts of people's experiences with health care). This is an excerpt from the site:

"The need to place first hand accounts of peoples’ experiences of health and social care at the centre of practice development, research, education and training agendas is widely acknowledged. Narrative interviews attempt to create a space where people can tell their stories as they wish with a minimum of direction. New digital multi-media technologies now provide a powerful way to capture both audio and visual histories, and permits users to search through material relevant to their own interests easily and quickly."

Maybe this is an area where digital data will be relevant (rather than in hypertext dissertations). Thoughts?