text messages

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.