Moving on from automated to human textual analysis, I've been having a bit of a look at XSight & NVivo from QSR. Back when I was doing my Masters, I recall a product called NUD*IST getting a mention. Basically this tool allowed the coding of interviews to help academics with quantitative analysis. This has become XSight for market research types & NVivo for academics.
XSight allows you to store your interview notes (ordered by research demographic) so you can annotate & tag them. You can create mind maps & research frameworks and then link them back to your source material & annotations. It's pretty handy but not as neat as the latest version of NVivo which allows you to code video and audio. NVivo makes less of the mind-mapping / white-boarding stuff and gets straight on with the multi-media tagging. It claims to have nifty collaboration & web publishing functionalities as well but I haven't put those to the test yet.
Now I've talked about hybrid human / automated metadata recently. I think we'll see hybrid semantic analysis tools emerging that mix automation & human involvement. SenseMaker is another example of this. We human beings are meaning machines. Just as we have created machines to enhance our vision & hearing so we need to develop technologies to aid our senses of comprehension.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
1 comment:
Hi Matt,
I am currently using nVIVO 7 for my Masters Research project. Like yo uI haven't probed the more advanced functions yet, however it is bringing together the recurring topics nicely and even after just a few interviews is beginning to "paint a picture" for me of the cultural issues effecting wiki use. Some are common sense, but others are running contrary to intuition and nVIVO is uncovering this as well in a way I can easily justify from the data later on. Very nice software.
I watched the video if nVIVO 8 a few weeks ago and was impressed, however I'm not sure how much having the actual audio available would help in my case.
Anyway, nice to see others trying out this great tool.
Stu French
Post a Comment