Sunday, February 27, 2011

Istanbul: Qualitative Computing: Day 2: Session 4

Istanbul: 4th session; day 2  (Friday, February 25, 2011).


The first speaker is not present, so we switch to a man who has wanted to share his project and get feedback.

Actually Rose steps in. We’ve just been talking animatedly about fractiles.


Rose Lema

Hpertextuality, complexity, creativity: computational design on bromatology and some by-products in a Maya Calepin. Rosa Lema.  Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Mexico City, Mexico

Bromatology=science of food and drinking

She is working with a database/dictionary on Mayan culture.

It was written by a friar living between 15th and 16th century. He was there for 40 years.

She defines hypertext

Poinecare (1906) e construction of a 3 body corpus…

She reads some short passages of Mayan
The Spanish text in the dictionary is 5300 words

Then she looks for words related to plants

Then she looks at the plant words and the frequencies.

She looked for animals; there were 31 equivalents.

Fruits: 109 occurrences.

Is her technology “Tropes”?

She shows how she uses different hypertext images in different forms to help her see the material in new ways.

Tropes goes from lists of codes to visualizations.

She demonstrates how different kinds of questions create the triangular perspective that helps her to get at the full range and possibilities of food words.

Plants and animals…then shifts to the names of things…and then the qualities of things…and words about food. .. ways that food is prepared…materials for preparing food. Associations are at the heart of what she is talking about, and how to draw associations from lists of words. The range of foods that can be linked…move out to lower frequencies;

She shows photographs of the actual foods—cooked or raw, showing how these words.

Tropes shows numbers and occurrences.

Star graphic depicts hypertextuality

Sphere graphic shows proportions between hypertext worlds

What can you learn?

Exp: plants were used medicinally, Mayans ate more plants and cereals than animals; they consumed more vitamins and minerals than animal proteins; corn and chili were extremely important as they are today; the term hunger appeared only once in the analysis.

Comment on Rose's presentation:  I had more opportunity later to talk with Rose about her work and the extensive linguistic fieldwork she has done with the Mayan's and other populations.  I think it would be very interesting if she tried some of the autoethnographic techniques that were talked about at the conference and drew upon some of this amazing field experience, connecting it with the great fieldwork materials she has collected.  She is eager and interested to try new technologies.  I can't wait to see what she comes up with next. 

“Practicing Qualitative Media Analysis with NVivo” Halise Zengin of Ankara University

She is the field of religious education. The film she analyzed is used for religious education. More and more often in religious education they are using DVD’s video’s etc.

She talks about trying to teach in a multi-cultural/multi-religious society.

“The Prince of Egypt”…Dreamwords, 1998; chunked into 5 sections and brought into NVivo 8.

Methodology

-Inter-religious Program in Hamburg; training for thinking about an interreligious lessons

-she talked about the topics that were the focus of the movie?

Movies convey language of senses

-focused on visual and spoken text

-worked inductively starting with free nodes…then moving to tree nodes

-coding; looked at events and heros

-added explanations in the captions to the side

-she describes in detail how she imported the chunks of the film and then the way she actually coded the film material

-issues with adding transcription…you can’t add easily at a later point.

-she talks about viewing text and image in the same slide.

-she talks about taking notes and making annotations, and how she visually viewed them and used them.

-matching nodes was easier to do with text than with the film; opening video codes had special problems

-she didn’t use the matrix coding feature or the chart option with this study

-in conclusion; coding works well, but retrieving has issues.

My comments about this session:  I was very intrigued by what she was attempting here with analysis of a commercial film in NVivo.  I wanted to know more about the specific technical challenges she ran up against--were they the problems of a beginner or is the software still not robust enough with this form of data.  It got me thinking about the ways I will use visual analysis in my upcoming qualitative research class.  The wheels are turning!

******

Finally, we heard from the stand-in person.  [I am sorry that I don't have his name...maybe someone from the conference will get in and comment on the post--and we can get his name.] 

He is using atlas.ti He is from Sabanci University

Started his project in 2008; Social structure religion in Turkey. One of the biggest studies in Turkey about religion. Religion is a hotly debated subjected in Turkey. We wanted to know how religion was related to gender, economics, and politics.

3 phases in 3 cities;

2 cities are industrial cities with strong religion incporated.

They stayed for a month in the communities they studied.

They considered what constituted religion in Turkey. There are tensions that define religiosity in Turkey.

Each stage defined on the earlier stage.

5 tensions in

1. Transcendence

2. Traditionality vs modernity

3. Public and private

4. Scientific knowledge and religous knowledge

5. Textual practices

These were put in a matrix: with gender, politics, economy, belief, and practice…with the 5 tensions.

In 2008 looked at 8 cities; went to each and conducted interviews.

Had recordings transcribed and then they were analyzed in Atlas-ti. They have about 14 hours of talk. They considered this the exploratory part. They tried to talk to as many different people as they could find. Some people were found on the street…some met through friends.

Next month they start Stage 3. It will be a survey.

They have money and time…so they are “doing more with more”. Turkish budgets have increased 10 or 20 times for research. They are trying to make this a textbook kind of research, because they have the resources to do so.

Questions start emerging from the audience:

-how did you find the participants?

-why gender and not age?

-why the particular cities?

-how many people did you interview? (192 people interviewed in 8 cities)

He wanted to share the struggles with Atlas-ti.

-7 individuals working on this; leaders and Ph.D. students

-would the analysis be data driven or theory driven?

-should we only code based upon the pre-selected topics? How inductive can we go?

They prepared a codebook; now they have 170 codes.

When they began to code across the cities, they ran into problems with multiple coders, and the identification of the different locations.

Suzanne Friese suggested that they put all the documents into one folder…and they got rid of the old stuff and started to work from the new way to work;

Then he shows a network picture of the material.

The coded sections of text…with coding stripes—looks familiar; then they wanted to think about how to analyze…how to get into the data?

They started to divide up the topics…which became families of codes…distributing a topic to each individual to code on from that perspective.

Then they started to look at the “thick codes”: exp—Pressure had 400+ codes. Then look at the codes in the network view…and was able to divide topics from that.

He talks about how to make a network view from within Atlas-ti—shows us the basics. Says that it can help you to see co-occurrence. Exp: How do you see relationship between Sharia and democracy…and gender? These things become visible.

Issues for Him: Teamwork and QDAS…and how to make the data reachable…how QDAS helps to make this easier and more efficient.

Questions for all the presentations:

Tropes: in several languages; used with any kind of text (dictionaries, poetry, etc.) Developed in France.

Question about the religious education study: Did you want to critique the material?

What’s the aim for analyzing the movie? It was exploratory activity for her as a theologist. It allowed her to experiment with the technology?

How will she use it in the future? She teaches comparative religion—how can you use to teach students different subjects that arise in this movie.

Question re: Atlas-ti—she has used MaxQDA and NVivo; the network view looks more grounded theory approach more apparent…more visible. All your data is there. [Does she mean that it is more concrete?]

Network functioning has always been a part of Atlas-ti so it may be one of the stronger features.

We have an animated discussion about how to best work in Atlas-ti; Suzanne describes the way that might work better; it’s a discussion between beginner and the more mature user.

*******
This wonderful piece of marble is from the Istanbul Archeological Museum.  It was placed up high, as it might have been on the building it once graced, so I almost missed it.  It was in the Roman section--a delightful picture of sea elements that really makes sense for this city that has so much fish, water, boats, etc. 





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