karen louise smith

For the past week I have been attending the Values in Design workshop at Santa Clara University in California. The organizers and guest faculty presented on a number of design projects and design methods which are interesting and noteworthy.

• Helen Nissenbaum presented on Track Me Not, which is a Firefox browser extension which allows users to hide their search queries. Essentially the system works by sending information generated from common searches, instead of the user’s actual searches to the search engine companies. Limitations of the system are that it is in English only and functions for the US versions of the engines only.

• Tracy Fullerton and Mary Flanagan presented on game design. As an interesting methodological contribution, they showed us the Values@Play Grow-A-Game cards for use in teaching reflective and value conscious game design
• Shay David did a demo of Kaltura which is an online environment for open source video editing, interaction and collaboration
  
  
  Presentations by Paul Dourish, Geof Bowker, Susan Leigh Star, Fred Turner and many others were also excellent parts of the event.

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.