karen louise smith

Last week during the DGPis40 conference, Nora Yong from CBC radio interviewed Ron Baecker on the multimedia biography project. For the past year, I have worked (on a part-time basis) with a team of researchers on this project. In brief, the research involves a research assistant working with a family where an individual has Alzheimer’s Disease or Mild Cognitive Impairment, to create a DVD movie of their life history. My main role has been to complete qualitative data analysis on the video data from the project. The video data set is from the ‘premiere’ and follow-up screenings with the participants.

To find out more about this work you can access the mp3 of the Spark episode. Ron’s segment is roughly the last third of the mP3.

I was in a panel today as part of the design research series at KMDI. The paper (in progress that) I presented is titled: ‘Cloudtags and talk back: Sketches from critical and digital design research practice.’ With this paper, I am interested in asserting two key ideas. First, I consider Schon’s idea of talk back in the design studio. Schon describes talk back as something communicated from the design materials to the designer. I feel this idea can be extended by considering participatory media and web 2.0 technologies where user generated content and contributions are prominent. Second, I discuss how the cloudtag’s status in the design process is fluid. Tagclouds can be a rough sketch or a 'final' design artefact. This panel and the design research series in general, grew out of a reading group. It was interesting to hear the four divergent directions we have taken with papers originating from a common body of literature.

This semester, I have been involved in the design research series at KMDI. Here is the abstract for the series of talks:

"Epistemologically, what do designers ‘know’? Are there ‘designerly ways of knowing’ distinct from the recognised scientific and other scholarly ways of knowing? Speakers from different disciplines will take these questions as their point of departure to explore what, for them, constitutes a legitimate knowledge claim. And, since research in knowledge media design is typically trans-disciplinary, we will also explore ways of fostering communication across disciplinary boundaries and bridging traditional epistemological divides."

The series has been successful so far and I’m looking forward to the speakers in future weeks, including Nigel Cross.

The provisional schedule for Politics: Web 2.0 conference being held in April 2008 at Royal Holloway University in the UK just got posted. I will be attending and presenting a paper related to photoblogging and social change.

Last week I handed in a paper on actor-network theory (ANT) and the possibilities of critical and politically engaged research involving the internet. For now, it is my ANT opus.

In completing my research one of the most interesting pieces I came across was by Noortje Marres. She deployed software called an Issue Crawler to use hyperlinks as a was to trace and describe a political issue network concerned with the ownership of the Development Gateway website.

If you have access through a university/institutional library you can see:

Marres, N. (2004). Tracing the trajectories of issues, and their democratic deficits, on the Web: The case of the Development Gateway and its doubles. Information Technology & People, 17(2), 124-149.

If you prefer information in gateless cyberspace, please see http://movies.issuecrawler.net/

I am always on the look out for Mac friendly software for research. Today, while doing research assistant work (aka comparison software shopping), I came across HyperRESEARCH, a qualitative data analysis (QDA) package that allows for the coding of video as primary text. This software allows you to pick a region of the video timeline and attach a code to it directly. In some ways, this is a huge advantage over having to transcribe video data before coding it. The disadvantage of course, is that the video cannot be output in a code report.

Other QDA software packages of interest are Nvivo 8 (scheduled for release in 2008) and Atlas.ti. Transana, a low-cost, open source package supports video only (not textual data).

Overall, it looks like the HyperRESEARCH package gets my recommendation. The free trial version of HyperRESEARCH is actually robust enough to handle projects where the primary source files and codes can be kept to a minimum (less than 7 and 50 respectively). I will be using this software. I would definitely also consider using the software trial with undergraduates, taking a qualitative methods course.