karen louise smith

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.