Technology interference in data collection, transcription and analysis

Another number of the Forum Qualitative Social Research is out, and although just gave a superficial reading to the table of contents and one of the contributions, the article by Jeanine Evers seem to answer some of my questions and issues when dealing with the huge amount of visual data (mainly photos) that I've collected for my research:

Evers, Jeanine C. (2011). From the Past into the Future. How Technological Developments Change Our Ways of Data Collection, Transcription and Analysis [94 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12(1), Art. 38.

The whole issue is dedicated to «Discussions on Qualitative Data Analysis Software by Developers and Users», which should be of interest for many people doing qualitative research and/or developing technological tools for qualitative analysis, reporting «The KWALON Experiment»:

"The KWALON Experiment consisted of five developers of Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) software analysing a dataset regarding the financial crisis in the time period 2008-2009, provided by the conference organisers. Besides this experiment, researchers were invited to present their reflective papers on the use of QDA software. This introduction gives a description of the experiment, the "rules", research questions and reflective points, as well as a full description of the dataset and search rules used, and our reflection on the lessons learned."

mobilities & open data

Reading Timothy Cresswell (2006), On the Move, and continuing with visual data collection of information artefacts that people carry (including mine) over time.

Not all data collected for my study is open (following participants will) but the ones that are open keep me wondering why they attract so many visitors. Always thought that only me and the people that are participating in the study would have any interest in the photos. Curiosity? An opportunity to look inside private places?

Implications for the study still need to be fully understood, namely the ones that deal with the agents awareness of wider visibility and interest in the photos, beyond research purposes.

losses in «information transitions»: time, errors, sync

Example of information loss in «information transitions». Actual high mobility of healthcare workers to collect data on tuberculosis patients. IS applied research solution: capturing information (almost) directly to PDA. Still have to be entered by workers, but after collected through the PDA stays in digital form and is apt for transfer to other IS.

"Under the old patient tracking system, a team of four healthcare workers would visit more than 100 health care centers and labs twice a week to record patient test results on paper sheets. A couple of times a week, they returned to their main office to transcribe those results onto two sets of forms per patient -- one for the doctors and one for the health care administrators.

From start to finish, that process took an average of more than three weeks per patient. There was also greater potential for error because information was copied by hand so many times.

With the new system, health care workers enter all of the lab data into their handheld devices, using medical software designed for this purpose. When the workers return to their office, they sync up the PDAs with their computers. " [taken from Harvard-MIT Health Science and Technology News & Events, Researchers use handheld devices to monitor TB patients in Peru]

The Petabyte Age

To reflect and provoke! 

In the last Wired News, The Petabyte Age: Because More Isn't Just More — More Is Different, they have an entry about «The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete».

So where is the method? The scientific rigour? If what they state was true, than scientist would be obsolete. Scientific method is not only about finding correlations in data. The scientific method allows for a number of triangulations: data, methods & theory. Scientific method starts from choosing what kind of data to look for, how to collect it, how to analyze, how to interpret the data.

Anyhow, it shows that the perception that having access to large amounts of data can suffice to make science :S

Rapid ethnography

Millen, D. R. (2000). Rapid ethnography: time deepening strategies for HCI field research. In Proceedings of the Conference on Designing interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, and Techniques. D. Boyarski and W. A. Kellogg, Eds. DIS '00. ACM Press, New York, August 17 - 19, 2000, pp. 280-286:

"Due to increasingly short product realization cycles, there has been growing interest in more time efficient methods, including rapid prototyping and various usability inspection techniques. This paper will introduce "rapid ethnography," which is a collection of field methods intended to provide a reasonable understanding of users and their activities given significant time pressures and limited time in the field. The core elements include limiting or constraining the research focus and scope, using key informants, capturing rich field data by using multiple observers and interactive observation techniques, and collaborative qualitative data analysis. A short case study illustrating the important characteristics of rapid ethnography will also be presented."

Photographs for documenting fieldwork (ethnography)

As i will need to uncover individual and group information spaces and information needs in mobility settings, I've started taking photos of meetings taking place in work settings, outside the organizations. Due to ethics on need of preserve individual identity, collected picture do not depict human subjects but concentrate on objects of information used during meetings (archives in my flickr account classified by date taken, settings, project acronym and place, among other key words that can be added later on during data analysis).

Supporting views for this method:

Kanstrup, Anne Marie (2002, May). Picture the Practice—Using Photography to Explore Use of Technology Within Teachers' Work Practices [32 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research [On-line Journal], 3(2).