Networked content

A very pleasant surprise - mere weeks after releasing QDA Miner 3.0, the team at Provalis Research have issued another features update.

Users now have the ability to import Atlas-ti 5.x "hermeneutic units" and to export co-occurrence matrices for network analysis.

Proprietary data formats have been a real limitation in CAQDAS software, keeping most users "locked-in" to whichever platform they use at the beginning of their work. I seriously doubt computer-supported data analysis will really "take-off" as long as such barriers exist.

Transfer to network analysis packages is less significant, only because QDA Miner has always had this feature (export matrix as Excel file, which most SNA packages read quite well). There are many examples of combined content and network analyses, but this seems to be a very underdeveloped technique in social science.

It's great to see developers of such great software continue to stretch and dissolve boundaries. Kudos to Normand for breaking down some walls.

The Web That Wasn't

Alex Wright (author of Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages) gave a fascinating presentation at Google last week, on The Web That Wasn't.

Laying out the web's pre-history (e.g., Otlet, Bush, Engelbart), Wright describes the contributions made by each of these men (and others), while covering some of the more creative ways that information architecture has been tweaked to promote a new scope and scale of human learning.

If you have 45 minutes to spare, I guarantee you'll learn something new.

CAQDAS on Puget Sound?

Now that I'm back in the neighborhood, I'm curious to see whether there are any users or developers interested in computer-assisted social scholarship. I've a few projects already going (for which it might be nice to have collaborators), and a few ideas simmering.

Please feel free to forward this along - I'd really enjoy hearing from folks in the region (or even this time zone). Easiest way to contact me is through the comments (we moderate them to limit spam, but this also gives us the opportunity to communicate directly with posters).

50+ Social Bookmarking Sites

Lifehacker has compiled a list of 50+ Social Bookmarking Sites.
Not much to add. Just that I found it informative.

Back to Basics: Note Taking

Gina Trapani over at Lifehacker has offered a nice overview of techniques and tools for taking great notes in meetings, lectures, etc. The comments are also quite helpful, pointing to several software applications to assist with note taking and informative websites on the topic. For my money, using MS Word's Styles feature for creating flexible outlines remains my favorite tool for organizing my reading notes and for brainstorming ideas.

QDAMiner 3.0 ships

We posted about the beta version back in May, but now the full version of QDAMiner 3.0 is finally available.

Part of the Provalis suite of quantitative and qualitative text analysis tools, QDAMiner now also supports image coding (comparable to Atlas.ti), supervised machine learning (document classification based on example), and offers many improvements to common (and not so common) analytical and data management tasks.

Again, both Mike and I have used Provalis software for years, and we're still discovering ways we can use it to interrogate text. Once the academy realizes how much of what we study is leaving an electronic record, tools like Provalis will become de rigueur for serious social scientists.

Web 3.0: The Elite Strike Back?

I have been struck by the extent to which the "democracy" metaphor is used to describe Web 2.0 developments. As someone who has dabbled in the academic study of political theory in general, and democratic theory in particular, I have thought a lot lately about how important epistemological and information-cost assumptions are to the rationale for our political system, and how information technology may or may not therefore allow us to rethink the possibilities and limits of our democratic institutions. More specifically, I have thought that perhaps the apparent success of Web 2.0 at harnessing the "wisdom of the crowds" points to the real possibilities for a responsible and more equitable alternative to our representative-based legislatures and petition-vote based citizen initiatives.

I was therefore intrigued by Jason Calcanis' recent discussion of the advent of "Web 3.0," which is to him a marked improvement over Web 2.0 because it prevents "the 'wisdom of the crowds' from turning into the 'madness of the mobs' we've seen all to often, by balancing it with a respect of experts." It seems to me that democratic theory is more relevant today than it has been in decades (which isn't saying much). Recommended reading for all Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 enthusiasts is Robert Dahl's Democracy and Its Critics, especially his "critique of guardianship" (Ch. 5) and his discussion in the penultimate chapter (Ch. 22) on what he views as the single greatest threat to "democracy in tomorrow's world": the rise of a technocratic elite "expert class" that uses its power-knowledge to restrain and subjugate non-experts rather than to empower and emancipate them.