A few months back I wrote a post about tooling up for research That post lives here. A few months on I have discovered a few more tools to share.
I should note here, that Kerim at Savage Minds has recently written about his use of Markdown. Further, Savage Minds has a wonderful collection of how-to posts on various matters related to tooling, broadly speaking. But, onto the new tools.
I use ConnectedText for two purposes. First, it has replaced Atlas.ti as my repository for holding and indexing data. As explained here it can be used as a sophisticated QDA tool, though I use it in a far more relaxed manner than the mysterious Dr. Andus describes. Further, unlike most commercial QDA programs, ConnectedText doesn’t force a Grounded Theory or mixed methods approach on the researcher.
Second, it serves as a Zettelkasten for my various reading notes and assorted thoughts. For an in depth look at the theory and practicalities of using ConnectedText as a Zettelkasten, see this overview by Manfred Kuehn.
Kuehn also runs a fascinating blog called Taking Note in which he writes about various methods of note taking and their relation to the production of texts. Highly recommended!
If you work from audio or video in a serious manner, then you know what a pain it can be to organize your data. Transana does a few things to make the process less painful.
First, it has a flexible project based method of organizing data which allows for making connections chronologically and/or thematically. Secondly, the developers have made good progress in allowing collaboration, which is no easy task with large video and audio files.
Most of the technical possibilities (and they are numerous) are fully explored in this research article written by the developer and a methodological consultant. Suffice to say, if you work with video games or in other multimodal environments, then Transana is worth investigating.
