The Intellectual Sandbox

Amongst the various tasks that I need to get done to close out this academic quarter (what one friend refers to as her “freedom list”), I need to write an evaluation of the class I have been taking on Digital Tools for Qualitative Research, Ed P&L 692. Fortunately, that is a relatively simple, and enjoyable task, largely because it was a really, fun, interesting class. In fact, this class was the closest I have come to “playing” since I started my doctoral program – which is high praise, indeed, from me. After all, I tell people that what I like most about working on my PhD is having the time, space, and permission to play in the intellectual sandbox of the social sciences. If that is the case, then this course gave me the bucket and spade, and some of those fun little sand molds for building sandcastles.

The course is also rare amongst graduate courses in that it really does do exactly what it sets out to do – that is, introduce you to the digital tools and software that you may need to conduct qualitative research, and provides an introduction to how to use them. We started off with the basics – blogs, wikis and citation management software, and moved on to audio and video editing and transcription software, through to the final session where we tried out some analysis software.

Although I thought that the first sessions might be a little tedious since I feel pretty familiar with those basic tools, I found new things to learn in terms of how they could be used, and the open-source software that is out there for managing them. For example, although I have been using Endnote for managing my references for a few years now, I had worried that maybe I was missing something by not using other software. This class gave me a chance to use some of those other systems, and discover that although there are always pros and cons, I am pretty content with my investment in Endnote. Similarly, I had known about Google reader, and how it could be used to provide a digest of all the blogs I follow, but, until this course, I had not got around to setting it up. I still want to figure out a better way to integrate notes, pdf’s of the references and their citations. The cute little elephant icon of Evernote is mocking me from my MacBook’s menu bar as I write this, but I have just not had the time to play with that enough to figure out how useful that will be. File that as still on my “to-do” list.

The real strength of this course, however, became apparent when we started recording, editing and transcribing audio and video, which are a critical component of most qualitative research. I have been fortunate to take this course in conjunction with EPL 966, the second course in our core Qualitative Inquiry sequence, in which we have been interviewing and transcribing interviews. So it was really great to have access to and tuition on these tools just in time to use them. I have used both TransanaExpress Scribe for transcribing, and plan to use HyperRESEARCH to play around with coding. I think that if I had been shown these tools separated from the need to use them for 966, I might not have appreciated their importance. Then, when I did need them for transcribing and coding, I would probably have forgotten a lot of the detail of how to use them. So, I think that I was lucky to have the opportunity to take both of these courses at the same time. and

In fact, I think that this course should really be the lab component of the main 966 methodology course. That would also justify expanding this course, 692, into a 2 credit component of 966, so that it could run as a weekly 2 hour lab throughout the quarter, rather than just for half the quarter for 1 credit. There is so much software out there to try, and it is only really in a lab session that you have the opportunity to try it all out. 966 would also provide the data that you need to test the software adequately. And having more time would also allow for a more in-depth discussion of the methodological implications of using digital tools in research.

Overall, though, probably most significant of all for me about this course, was being prompted to set up this very blog for myself. I have long been a rather compulsive follower of various blogs, and have always kept some kind of personal journal, so it is surprising, really, that I never got around to setting up my own blog. Part of that was due to lack of time and motivation to explore the software involved, but, probably more importantly, there was no real reason or excuse to feel like I could or should inflict my voice on the blogosphere. Now that I have done so, I find it surprisingly liberating. And my concern about whether anyone really wants to read it is, actually, irrelevant. Not that I don’t welcome readers, if you are out there, but that I am finding it interesting writing for my blog whether anyone is reading or not. In other words, in the blogosphere, even if no one sees the tree falling in the forest, it still matters, to me, at least. The question is, will I continue now that the course requirement to do so is over? It remains to be seen, but I think that I will be back. So watch this space.

What the heck is CAQDAS? And why do I need to know about it?

For the uninitiated - okay, most of you sane people out there with a life - CAQDAS, as I discovered only recently, is an acronym for Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software. Since I aspire to be a qualitative researcher, and a bit of a (marginal) tech geek, then the prospect of computer software that can assist me in analyzing data is very appealing. So this is what this post is going to be about... fair warning to those of you (okay everyone apart from my course instructor) who is already dozing off.

Actually, just to backtrack a little, although I refer to myself as a qualitative researcher, to be honest, I am really a mixed methodologist, since my dissertation research and therefore my expertise will need to address both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Quantitative methods are more familiar to me with my biological sciences background, and, if I wanted an easier life, I should probably have stuck to quantitative methods for my doctoral research. But then, if I wanted an easier life, I probably wouldn't be attempting a PhD in the first place, and I find qualitative methods intuitively appealing. From a more scholarly perspective, I think that my research questions about the career choices of female veterinary students in the context of feminization of the profession, are best explored, at least initially, through open-ended interviews and discussion with a few students. Then I will develop the emerging themes into a more quantitative, national survey. Anyway, with that in mind, since quantitative methods rely pretty heavily  on specialist softare packages such as SPSS these days, I figured that qualitative research should be able to do the same.

So, how does all my methodological angst relate to CAQDAS? Well, one of the points made in the article, by Koenig, that we read for class, was that since there are so many different versions of CAQDA software out there, it is important to match the right software to the methodological and theoretical approaches of your research. Although this is a very appealing sort of symmetry, if I may be cynical, I suspect that the reason there are so many options for software on the market is less to do with methodological diversity, and more to do with the fact that none of them are clearly superior to the others, with all the features that you need them to do. The other thing that rapidly becomes apparent in reading this article, is that mundane things such as the platforms supported by each software will limit selection significantly, especially if you are a Mac user - which I am. Of the long list of software reviewed by the article, only two can be used with Mac OS X - HyperRESEARCH and TAMS.

This surprised me, since it is increasingly rare to encounter Mac-Windows incompatibility with software these days, and this was another indication that the development of this kind of software is still in its infancy. It is my impression (not that I have much to back this up with) that more established types of software are pretty universally available on both platforms these days. Another indication that CAQDAS is still evolving pretty rapidly was that many of the features that were considered lacking in HyperRESEARCH by Koenig, have recently been addressed in a new upgrade, according to the Researchware website. Amongst these updates are the addition of hierarchical (rather than flat) coding capabilities; better linking to the same company's transcription software HyperTRANSCRIBE, to allow display and synchronization of transcriptions to the original audio or video media; and, support for Rich Text Format (rtf) files. These were all issues cited as being a problem for this software by Koenig, and so I am encouraged that they have been addressed. I am intrigued, also, by the fact that HyperRESEARCH has the ability to allow you to diagrammatically link different codes, in a relatively straightforward manner. I am a big fan of concept mapping, and use IHMC Cmap tools software quite a lot to map out my research, so I am curious to see how this works.

I think that one of the main problems in distinguishing between all the options for CAQDA software, and for fully understanding Koenig's article, is that I don't fully understand the process of coding and analyzing qualitiative research data yet. All of the other software that we have surveyed in this class has been designed to perform a function that I have tried to do in other ways - organize and cite references, organize notes, and so on. But the whole concept of coding is still pretty fuzzy to me, so it is really hard for me to distinguish the pros and cons of different features of these kinds of software. In this arena I am still stuck in the dualistic cognitive learning phase where I just want someone to tell me what to think.


HyperRESEARCH is relatively expensive, at least for a poor student ($199 without the transcription software), but they do have a free trial version. Coincidentally, when I did a search through my university's Office of Information Technology, to see if HyperRESEARCH is available under an institutional license (which it is not), I came across an article written by my PhD advisor, which used HyperRESEARCH for the data analysis. It looks as if that was an older version, but I will be interested hear what she thought of it. It is not encouraging that she was asking ME about CAQDAS the other day, knowing that I was taking this class, and because she had just invested in a copy of NVivo, a rival system.

In the meantime, I have downloaded the trial copy, and I will give it a try, especially after we have gone over some basic techniques for using analysis software in class on Tuesday. I may report back. On the other hand, if it crashes my computer and destroys all my data, I may be gone for some time.

My first blog - trying to get organized

So here it is - my first blog entry! It's strange, after years of writing for myself, and a small addiction to reading OTHER people's blogs, you'd have thought that I would have started my own blog a long time ago. But, it turns out, I am actually quite shy about sharing my thoughts about the world in a public forum, unless, of course, it is a status update on Facebook for select friends only. Even then, I am aware of editing myself quite a bit.

So, I guess I may never have got around to setting up a blog if it wasn't a class requirement for a course I am taking on Digital Tools for Qualitative Researchers. Yikes! Not only do I have to publish my writing to the great, wide world of the internet, but I am supposed to sound somewhat scholarly and thoughtful as well. Scary stuff indeed. I have still not decided if I will really release this publicly (no doubt to be crushingly ignored by the world), or just submit it for the class and keep it private. Maybe I will compromise and only share it with select (and, hopefully indulgent) family and friends.

The good news is that actually setting up the blog was definitely the easy part. The toughest decision was which design template to pick, and it's not as if that is an irreversible decision. The next problem was what to call my blog. I can't claim to have put too much thought into that - "The Vetty Thesp" came back to me as I tried to come up with a quick and dirty description of who I am. At Cambridge, I was a vet student, who did a lot of acting, which was an unusual combination, hence the nickname. Most vets did sports, or outdoorsy, hearty activities, or, if they were smart (like my dear husband), they didn't do much extracurricular stuff at all since the vet course took up a lot of time and required more than your average amount of work. But I hung out with students in the humanities and social sciences, rehearsing, learning lines, and generally being slightly pretentious. I wasn't particularly talented, but had a wonderful time basking in the glow of people who were - including, just to name drop a bit, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Rachel Weisz, not that either one of them would remember me.

Anyway, these days I don't act, and I am not really a clinical vet either, but I do still seem to have (and enjoy) an interdisciplinary approach to life and work. I work in veterinary education - trying to design curricula for professional veterinary students, while working on my own PhD in Educational Policy and Leadership. As such, I feel like I am a bit of a translator, moving between the biological science paradigms and professional world of veterinary medicine, and the more postmodern, qualitative, social science world of higher education. So I stuck with the nickname for my blog, at least until I can come up with a better one.

But, enough rambling on about me. The other part of the class assignment was to review a piece of software that had been introduced in the course. In the spirit of the New Year, I have been trying to get organized, and so, it made sense to me to explore some of the software we had been talking about that is designed to help organize and keep track of scholarly references and notes. I have been using Endnote for a few years, thanks to my brilliant husband, who introduced me to it not long after I started my graduate program. It is pretty brilliant for organizing and keeping track of references, as long as you are disciplined at entering the relevant information as you come across it. The pay off comes when you are writing a paper, and you can use the "cite while you write" feature, so that you can add the citations directly from Endnote into Word. The software formats the citations according to whatever style manual you set it to (APA Style - 6th edition for most of my courses), AND creates the appropriate bibliography at the end of the document as well. For anyone that has ever done this manually, you will appreciate how awesome that is. (I know, I need to get out more...!)

These days, you can also link each reference in Endnote to a pdf of the article, as long the file is saved somewhere on your computer. The problem with that, is that I have not found a good way to organize and keep track of all the pdf's I have stored all over my hard drive. I have started to save them all into one folder for all my Endnote references, but, I have not been good about labeling them or sorting them by any other meaningful system. And so, it was with interest, that I learnt about Mendeley, a free software system that is designed to organize your academic reference pdf files.

Mendeley has some pretty cool features. I downloaded it onto the hard drive of my MacBook, and imported all the pdf files that I had in my Endnote folder - it extracted all the bibliographic information from the pdf's of all the journal articles, and so, effectively, created another bibliographic library. Since it is web-based, this means that I can access my library from any computer, including an iPhone and iPad app, which I have yet to try, but I am excited about. Finally, it allows you to mark up pdf's with highlighting and notes, similar to Adobe Acrobat, except that it is right there, linked to the bibliographic information.

I must admit that I am just beginning to explore all the features of Mendeley (this class assignment was due before I had time to play more). So I have not yet figured out how best to use it for my needs. I am particularly intrigued by the feature that allows you to set up an automatic sync with any folder on your hard drive, which would mean that anytime I add a file to my Endnote folder, it will update my Mendeley library as well. But I have found one big limitation, that makes me inclined to think that I am not letting go of my dear, comfort-blankie that is Endnote, and that is that Mendeley does not seem to cope well with pdf files of book chapters or other sources that are not journal articles. I don't think I realized how many of my references are non-journal articles, until I realized that I couldn't find them in Mendeley. I am sure that it is possible to manually enter that information, but I am loathe to go through that process when it is all right there in Endnote anyway - I just don't have the time to do that all over again. Maybe there is a way to download all that information from Endnote directly into Mendeley, but I haven't found it yet. Finally, it may be possible to "cite-while-you-write" from Mendeley, but again, I am not that far up the learning curve. Having said that, I am having problems, right now, with getting that feature to work with Endnote in my new MS Office for Mac 2011as well. For a technophobe like me, all these updates and additions sometimes end up being more exhausting than helpful. Sigh!

Finally, on a quick, fun note... this course on digital tools has also introduced me to Wordle. You can upload any word document or enter a website, and it will create an unlimited (?) number of really pretty word clouds based on the frequency of words in the text. I definitely haven't figured how I could use this for scholarly reasons, but it sure is fun to play with. Just for fun, I am attaching a word cloud of this blog post, as my first, official "Word Art:" My First Blog.

Bye for now!