karen louise smith

I’m at home right now on the couch and Michelle Obama is on CNN and Larry King live. Seeing Michelle on TV reminds me to Google her husband on YouTube to find the Yes We Can music video.

The video is old news by now, but I felt the need to check it out anyways. When I arrived on YouTube, the counter displayed 3,409,935 views. After I played the video, I scrolled down and looked at the comments. As one might expect any political video with over 3 million hits, some of the comments contribute little to a deliberative public sphere. My overall impression of the video however, is that it packs a punch. The simple rhetorical refrain of 'Yes We Can' is inspiring to me. As a Canadian, I cannot vote in the US election but I will continue to watch with interest.

I mean what I say. It is now 12:31 am and Michelle has departed from Larry King. They've moved on to Mike Huckabee and apparently the Democrat/Republican coverage is in balance this evening.

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.