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NVivo 10 launched
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Posted by Dr Andus
Jun 27, 2012 at 12:14 AM
NVivo is a qualitative data analysis software geared towards the academic (and other) social science research markets. It’s mainly for “coding,” which in qualitative analysis lingo means “categorising data.” It is a supercharged categoriser of disparate data in a variety of formats. Its strength however was its main weakness for me. I found that I ended up with so many categories that I started going off-track and losing the big picture.
I used NVivo 8 for a while and then abandoned it for ConnectedText, as I found that CT could replicate most of its basic functions and that the wiki environment brought some additional benefits. CT offered more freedom to design my own work flow and maintain focus on the central developing themes.
NVivo 9 didn’t offer enough new features for me to be tempted back. However, NVivo 10 seems to have a lot of interesting new features, including website capture and Evernote import. I recommend watching the video, as it shows a lot of features that have been discussed in relation to various PIMs on this forum. I think PIM and outliner developers can learn a few tricks from NVivo 10:
http://youtu.be/D8YT6150fLA
The downside is that NVivo single licence is very expensive ($670). The student licence is cheaper ($215) but it expires after 1 year. If you’re lucky, your university or organisation may have a site licence.
I don’t think I’ll be rushing to get NVivo 10 because of my NVivo 8 experience. It’s such a resource-sucking software that I had to buy a brand new top-of-the-range PC to be able to run it. Plus they haven’t resolved the main issue for me. NVivo basically operates on the principle of a wiki, in the sense that the various features are all based on the creation of links between different entities. However, they managed to force this wiki functionality into a hierarchical straight-jacket, so it only works in the background and can’t be used to visualise things or combine them as CT lets you do.
Nevertheless, I have to admit NVivo 10 does look very good in the video at least. I’ll have to send this link to Eduardo, perhaps he will get some ideas from this… :)
Posted by Dominik Holenstein
Jun 27, 2012 at 07:33 AM
Dr Andus
Many thank for the hint to NVivo, a very interesting tool.
The price for a commercial licence of v10 is $2,345.- , quite hefty.
Posted by critStock
Jun 27, 2012 at 07:33 PM
Incidentally, since this genre of software has come up, I note that the newest version of the one I use, Atlas.ti 7, has just come out, also: http://www.atlasti.com
Posted by Cassius
Jun 27, 2012 at 09:29 PM
Well, it looks like there are some statistically oriented people in our group. Not having done work in the area of categorizing data, I can only guess that the software discussed uses cluster analysis.
Those interested is such topics might wish to look at the free “R” statistical system
( http://www.r-project.org ). R began as an open source version of S+ and has grown remarkably.
-cassius
Posted by Dr Andus
Jun 27, 2012 at 09:41 PM
Cassius wrote:
>Well, it looks like there are some statistically oriented people in our group. Not
>having done work in the area of categorizing data, I can only guess that the software
>discussed uses cluster analysis.
Actually both NVivo and Atlas.ti are primarily qualitative research tools, so categorising is mostly done on a textual basis (the user coming up with categories based on the meaning of textual segments). Although there are some features in NVivo that try to quantify some qualitative information, such as the frequency of words or summarising qualitative questionnaire results.