Chris’ cool visualizations of Knowledge Forum data–my thesis data–are really exciting! The web of interconnections between the notes graphed over time are promising, and tagging and clever use of color might be revealing. Looking forward to more:)
Meanwhile, I’m going to play around with NVivo to code the discourse. I’ve used it previously to code interview and learning journal data, but wasn’t sure how to deal with threaded discourse. Fortunately, Chris already knew how and explained how notes can be exported as xml and then imported into NVivo as .rtf documents. Thanks Chris.
To get advice on how to go about analyzing discourse in NVivo to answer my research questions, I met with Sue Elgie, former senior research consultant at OISE/UT. Sue was able to show me some helpful features in NVivo for these analyses. I’ll blog about these features as I make use of them in actual analysis soon. Oh, one thing that might be of interest to Wendy–I’m going to include in my analyses annotations on KF notes, just as one might include comments on blog entries. Not all of them will be useful, but Sue said I couldn’t exclude them. In my case, the annotations are part of the note document, so I guess they belong to the author of the note.
BTW, for those who can make it to campus, U of T is hosting the Canadian launch and demo of NVivo 7 on Friday, March 31, 2006. I’m planning to go–should be neat.
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