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ConnectedText; any case studies?
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Posted by Dr Andus
Mar 21, 2012 at 02:44 AM
Daly de Gagne wrote:
>Dr Andus, thanks for the reference to Manfred’s description of how he’s used CT.
>I need someone to talk me through the initial stages of
>getting going with CT. If I had such a person, I’d gladly buy CT.
>
>I suspect if there was
>a CT for Dummies book, that chunked everything down, and explained some of the
>implicit assumptions about working with wikis in general, and CT in particular, I’d
>be OK. But since Wiley hasn’t published such a book in the Dummies series, I need to be
>able to work with a live person.
But you are right. There don’t seem to be enough beginner’s case studies around to facilitate this entry stage.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Mar 21, 2012 at 04:03 PM
Dr Andus wrote:
>Then came the next phase, which meant actually starting the work in CT, without
>spending too much time reading the Help file. And I’m progressing step-by-step,
>looking up the Help file or the CT forum or actually asking for help as and when I need it.
>And so learning about CT has been incremental and totally in parallel with inventing
>my own version of it (i.e. my own desktop layout, arrangement of tools, creating
>logical relationships between documents (topics) and categories etc.). So I
>recommend 1) finding a problem you need to solve (a writing or organisational
>problem), 2) get stuck into CT, and 3) learn about the features as you go along and ask
>for help when needed.
Daly, I agree with Dr Andus’s approach for learning or growing into CT—especially number 1. If you have an idea of where you want to get to, that does probably make it easier.
But there is also the approach of just starting out thinking of CT as a collection of note cards. Create notes as needed and don’t worry about the wiki part at first. You can open and dock the Topics list, which gives you a flat index of all your topics. Now you’ve got what is a pretty conventional note manager with editor and index of topics. Also, the search functions are pretty robust, so I don’t think you’ll be in any danger of not being able to get to your information. You can then just slowly teach yourself some of the features of CT, making your database more sophisticated as you go along. You can also use the Auto Link feature, which sniffs out phrases that match Topic titles and creates links for you.
Steve Z.
Posted by Dr Andus
Mar 23, 2012 at 03:10 AM
Most recently I’ve started using CT as a qualitative data analysis solution, to code textual data, for which I used NVivo in the past. This is what I do:
1. I take a 20,000 word document (a transcript of an interview) and paste it into CT as a new ‘topic’ (document).
2. I dock the table of contents window on the left, and have the edit view of the document on the right of it.
3. I start reading through the document and “code” it by adding in headings (up to 5 levels).
4. As headings are added, they start showing up in the TOC pane in the left, so I can see the hierarchy of the themes (codes).
5. When a large enough thematic group emerges (under a top-level heading), I use the “cut to new topic” command to remove that chunk of text from the current topic, so it becomes a topic of its own. This way the text I’m working on is gradually reducing in size, and eventually becomes the central (home) page from which the coded topics become linked.
6. I open the Navigator pane to see the relationship between the ‘home page’ and the associated coded pages (between 5-10 documents).
7. Then I open the Topics and Categories panes and dock them to the right-hand side of the CT window. Then I proceed adding the newly created topics (documents or pages) to the relevant categories.
8. I then review each newly created coded topic and write a conclusion section, which contains the conclusions drawn from the given material, basically the findings of the research.
9. Once I’ve done that for each new topic, I return to the ‘home page’ of this group of topics (which was the topic I started out with but which now only contains the links to these coded topics) and I use the “including parts of topics” command to incorporate all the conclusion sections from the coded topics. Essentially I’m extracting (or abstracting) the findings of the various sections.
10. Once my topic home page contains the extracted findings, I then consolidate these findings into a final set of findings (another level of abstraction).
11. As a final step, I use the “including parts of topics” command to extract this final set of findings and include them in my “Findings” topic, which should be the top level findings page for the entire research project.
So basically what I have done here is I have carried out a qualitative analysis of textual research data, by “coding the data” (thematising it), and then carry out several operations of abstraction, by drawing out and consolidating the research findings. I like to think about it as a “bubbling up” process, as I’m going from the particular text (the interview transcript) and I gradually move to a more abstract (higher) level, by dragging out the findings, reaching eventually the top level of abstraction, which will constitute the theoretical contribution of my study.
Posted by Dr Andus
Mar 23, 2012 at 03:26 AM
Dr Andus wrote:
>So basically
>what I have done here is I have carried out a qualitative analysis of textual research
>data, by “coding the data” (thematising it), and then carry out several operations of
>abstraction, by drawing out and consolidating the research findings. I like to think
>about it as a “bubbling up” process, as I’m going from the particular text (the
>interview transcript) and I gradually move to a more abstract (higher) level, by
>dragging out the findings, reaching eventually the top level of abstraction, which
>will constitute the theoretical contribution of my study.
Now the nice thing about this is that my theoretical findings are linked directly (via hyperlinks) to the actual empirical material from which they have been deduced, thus allowing me to go back and check my findings or to select material to cite as evidence, once I’m in the final stage of writing up my research.
The main difference between doing this kind of coding in CT as opposed to NVivo is that it is just much faster, as NVivo is a rather sluggish beast. Also, NVivo tends to encourage you to attach multiple relevant codes (tags) to a highlighted section of text. The individual codes do get aggregated elsewhere, but basically NVivo disrupts and chops up the analysis process, as the relationships between the codes are not immediately visible. With CT however it’s possible to see in the table of contents window all the relevant codes (the headings), as well as the hierarchical relationships between them. So in CT it’s just easier to relate the codes to the text and take them in visually and cognitively.
Posted by Dr Andus
Mar 23, 2012 at 03:41 AM
Dr Andus wrote:
>So basically
>what I have done here is I have carried out a qualitative analysis of textual research
>data, by “coding the data” (thematising it), and then carry out several operations of
>abstraction, by drawing out and consolidating the research findings. I like to think
>about it as a “bubbling up” process, as I’m going from the particular text (the
>interview transcript) and I gradually move to a more abstract (higher) level, by
>dragging out the findings, reaching eventually the top level of abstraction, which
>will constitute the theoretical contribution of my study.
The “bubbling up” metaphor though might not be the best to describe what’s happening. It is more of a manual process of pulling, extracting, dragging out findings from the text, and it all happens in a flat wiki world. Nevertheless some kind of a structure or hierarchy emerges out of this space, where the central node (the Findings page) eventually becomes the top level of the hierarchy.