Another Tag Cloud

I wanted to try another tag cloud with my own real data to see what happened, so here it is. Very interesting indeed.

able (7) ah (23) anything (6) anyways (7) attention (5) based (5) basically (6) beginning (5) book (5) city (9) class (15) classroom (13) computer (13) control (5) couple (9) course (5) critical (4) critique (7) days (5) demo (13) design (16) develop (5) different (8) download (5) enough (4) everything (5) forget (7) free (7) games (45) getting (7) give (7) going (22) gotta (5) grad (4) hear (5) helps (4) historical (7) history (23) interested (11) issue (6) kids (26) laughs (9) learning (18) lesson (4) link (6) lot (10) major (6) making (4) mind (4) model (5) name (5) oh (7) okay (8) paper (5) parents (5) particular (6) past (6) paying (5) people (16) period (4) playing (14) point (5) political (4) project (4) read (9) real (6) really (21) research (5) resources (6) roman (6) rome (8) saying (5) school (21) simulation (25) someone (5) something (11) sort (25) sources (9) start (6) students (10) study (4) sure (7) systems (5) table (5) talking (7) taught (5) teach (9) teacher (5) things (33) think (37) total (8) uh (42) um (69) usually (4) video (10) war (8) ways (4) working (10) yeah (28) years (5)

created at TagCrowd.com

Tag Clouds

In my new qualitative research class tonight, the topic of tag clouds (for some nice examples, see this wikipedia article) came up as a means of visualizing qualitative research data. I hadn't thought about using them in this way, but I can most definitely see their usefulness. I searched google and found a program free online called TagCrowd that is easy to use and generates nice-looking tag clouds. You can either import a plain text document (of say an interview or observation) or you can point it to a website (like a blog or a wiki) and it then takes the most frequently used words (ignoring common words like "the" and "of") and makes a tag cloud showing the which words were used more frequently by corresponding text size. It also give you the html code of the cloud so that you can add your tag cloud to your web site (which I have done below on a practice interview about learning to read) or you could just take a screenshot and add it to a word doc or leave it as is to save locally. There are a few other features such as being able to rearrange the words in the cloud which seem handy as well. This may be a good way to get over the hump and start finding codes.

able actual ah anything bible books chair children church dad describe else er experience front golden help home house laughs learning living looking lot memories mom music okay pause piano pictures play preschool process read really remember room specific stories sure teacher think uh um understanding used voice whatever yeah

created at TagCrowd.com

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?

Online Surveys

If you are conducting interviews or survey in your qualitative research, you may want to consider using the many (and free) survey tools available. I am familiar with surveymonkey, which is simple to use and includes analytic tools, but if you have the free version, you are limited to ten questions. If you search google for "free online surveys" there are many more to explore! Please let me know if you have found any that are useful in qualitative research.

Hypertext Dissertations

In response to Mitsu's post about needing to see some dissertations that use hypertext. I searched the web and found some examples you all might be interested in exploring. Angel also did her Master's project in this manner, so you may be able to ask her to share her insights.

http://www.sympoiesis.net/?q=onlinediss#
(these are from the 90s, some links are broken, but provide are basic examples)

http://www.nutball.com/dissertation/mains/Narra1.html
(individual research)

Welcome Winter 09 Students... Take two!

I am so glad to have you all in class for the second half of the quarter. Please look over the website at your leisure and let me know if there is anything that looks particularly appealing to you or that perhaps you know well enough to skip. My goal for this class is that it be helpful and pertinent to you and your research. In addition, please take this short survey...

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Sw6Z5CiQdars1l14y_2fY2ww_3d_3d

Concept Map Tools

In class today, I mentioned some concept map tools that I think may be helpful to qualitative research. I have tried Vue, which is from Tufts University and pretty simple to use (and free). Amy had a link to mindmeister on her blog, which I have not used, but which looks interesting because it is web-based (so, no downloading) and can be shared with other users. Also, Lucy asked about using NetDraw, which I have not looked into yet, but it is also a concept mapping tool for mapping and counting nodes and such in a social networking environment. I think I may be adding these as part of the class in the future.