Digital Tools!

Welcome!  This blog has received a lot of traffic lately and I thought it deserved an updated post explaining how the blog works and what I am currently doing in the qualitative research field.  This blog was used as a course blog for a course I taught as a graduate student at Ohio State University.  I basically used this blog to facilitate the course.  I used it as a guide to each class session, a repository for resources and a place to answer questions that my students had.  The course, Digital Tools for Qualitative Research, was a 1 credit hour class for graduate students that was an enhancement to the qualitative research sequence.  The course had 5 sessions that can be found here or by clicking on the label "EPL692" on the top right side of the screen.  The sessions are listed in reverse chronological order, as this is a blog and that's how they work.  :)  Please feel free to utilize this blog as a part of your courses on qualitative research. 

Recently, I became aware that this blog was an editor's pick for the top qualitative research blogs on Qualitative 360, "The Innovation Hub for Quallies."  I'm flattered and energized that this blog has gone on to have another life after my course ended.  In 2011, I finished my PhD at Ohio State and am currently working on a chapter on digital tools in qualitative research that will appear in James Beebe's second edition of Rapid Assessment Process: An Introduction which will be out in early 2014.  If you are looking for a collaborator on a qualitative research project, have questions for me or would like to share how you are using this blog, please feel free to contact me at lauren.angelone@gmail.com.  I would love to hear from you!

Welcome Winter 2011 Students

Welcome to Digital Tools for Qualitative Research! I look forward to having you in this class and having a chance to share some helpful tools as well as learning from you in the process. Please feel free to browse this site before class begins as it has evolved over the two and a half years that I have been teaching it. If you click the label "EPL692" on the right hand side of the screen, you will find the course information, hardware/software you will need, and all five sessions for this course. We will also be going over this information on the first day of class. Please let me know if you already have experience in any of these areas and we can work out an alternative assignment in something more pertinent to your work. We are all tight on time and my ultimate goal is for this class to be useful to you. Here's to a great quarter!

We will take this survey on the first day of class:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BY3PMYJ

Video Resources

The Digital Media Project here at OSU supports teaching and research in Digital Media Studies by centrally locating state of the art technology and expertise for teachers, students, and scholars in the Department of English. The hours on listed on the website and the project is housed in Denny Hall. There, you can get help on using iMovie.

Another resource available for video conversion is a tool called anysoft. It requires a download, but it is free. Thanks, Deb!

Recording Online Interviews

If you are looking for a way record interviews on skype, here is a helpful blog post listing resources to do so:
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/06/how-to-record-skype-conversations.html

Ecamm is mentioned in this post and was also recommended by one of my current students.

Camstudio was also recommended by another student and is free and open source.

Not mentioned in this post is also Jing, a screencasting tool, which allows you to record for free up to five minutes (you can pay for beyond that).

Welcome Autumn 2010 Students!

Welcome to Digital Tools for Qualitative Research! I look forward to having you in this class and having a chance to share some helpful tools as well as learning from you in the process. Please feel free to browse this site before class begins as it has evolved over the two years that I have been teaching it. If you click the label "EPL692" on the right hand side of the screen, you will find the course information, hardware/software you will need, and all five sessions for this course. We will also be going over this information on the first day of class. Please let me know if you already have experience in any of these areas and we can work out an alternative assignment in something more pertinent to your work. We are all tight on time and my ultimate goal is for this class to be useful to you. Here's to a great quarter!

We will take this survey on the first day of class:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/N7ZXNHS

Google Search Tips

A former student recently sent me this nice, concise list of tips for more precise Googling. Could it help you in your qualitative research? I'd like to think so.
http://www.techlearning.com/blogs/32300

Resources from ICQI

I recently attended ICQI and attended a session conducted by Judith Davidson and Silvana diGregorio (who will have a chapter in the newest edition of The Handbook of Qualitative Research). They suggested many of the tools we already use in class as well as some new ones! Here are the ones that I would like to look into:

a.nnotate- A tool to annotate and share documents or images online
Everyday Lives- A tool to document the everyday lives of your participants (audio, video, images)... the best part? There's an iPhone App!
Word Tree- Sort of like a word cloud, but this tool allows you to select a word or phrase and then creates a tree of how that word or phrase is used.
Phrase Net- Diagrams the relationships between different words used in a text

Also, for the record, I learned that you can now annotate youtube videos! Flickr also has great annotation.