Thanks Wendy for referring me to Zoomclouds. I now have 30 tags of all my entries to date on my weblog. Clicking on a semantic cloud tag, e.g. graduate students displays the entries that used the tag: My thoughts on a PhD; Positioning yourself for a career in academia; and Finding and connecting.
As a research tool, I see some obvious possibilities for coding blog entries, but by analogy, also for coding Knowledge Forum notes. For KF discourse, what would be interesting, I think, would be to relate analyses of the social network of individuals (participants) with the semantic analyses like tag clouds (see Clare’s entry re: Downes’ (2005) paper “Authors need content, and content needs authors“). So, maybe a tool that combines individual participation data from ATK and semantic tag clouds for groups of notes (see Chris’ entry showing a week of KF discourse). Just some thoughts.
I wanted to elaborate a bit on my NVivo coding categories. In NVivo Help, descriptive coding seem to refer to coding attributes (gender, age, location, etc.) of individual cases. I prepared my questionnaire data for importing this sort of data into a casebook using a tab-delimited file. In addition, I’m using free nodes to describe or characterize the KF discourse at what Wendy calls the technical level (e.g. annotations, scaffolds) and also at the content analysis level, attempting to capture meanings that don’t explicitly use the terms in tag clouds.
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