[Cross-posted at Wind Farm]
I've been playing around with TagCrowd quite a bit as I review and analyze my data. It's a fantastic tool that's helping me "hover above the data" (a [sage] recommendation of Eli's). Notice the happily coincidental part of the hovering advice and the tag cloud: "hover", "cloud." The idea is to step back from the data, depersonalize it. And so I employ the cloud (via TagCrowd). I've been playing with it all along, but now it feels like a legitimized research tool. Beautiful. I love it!
The tag cloud below is the visualization of all of the data that I currently have in Word Document format. Still I am missing about 200 or so pages of interview transcripts. As well, all of the photos and other cultural documents don't really transfer into TagCrowd.
There are a few potential, um, sticking points about employing TagCrowd as an analytic tool. First, I'm not entire certain of how it determines word frequency. For example, is "guy" and "guys" considered the same word? Either way it affects the frequency count. I assume that this is not the case. But I don't know for sure. Second, I'm struggling to determine which words to exclude from the visualization (there is a feature that allows you to make a list of words to exclude - nice!). So, for example, do I exclude "really" from the list? If so, why? Potentially, "really" or "pretty" signify something about the discourse of the guys as well as my fieldnoting. I'm not doing a discourse analysis, but still such decisions matter.
There are some major positives to using TagCrowd. First, it is a really cool way of presenting data in an alternative format. It's definitely non-traditional. Second, it offers a level of transparency to the analysis. It shows the word frequency and provides insight into the raw data. E.g. if I'm arguing that "Coach" played a major role in the literacy practices of the student-athletes you can look and see that "Coach" was one of the most frequently used terms (it doesn't come through in the cloud below b/c of some edits I made to the word list, but Coach was actually the most frequently appearing term throughout all of the data).
There are other positives and negatives. The positives, however, far outweigh the negatives. As a result, there will be a version of the below tag cloud appearing in my dissertation.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Diss Data TagCrowd
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Update
It's been quite a while, so I thought I'd poke my head in for a lil update.
Right now I'm still collecting data for my ethnographic study of literacy practices of student-athletes. My subjects are still in the midst of their season and are stretched for time, so data collection has been slow since xmas. I've also had to make some adjustments to the original study design because of issues of access to my subjects. This part has been both frustrating and interesting.
Since the data collection is in something of a lull, I've been trying to read and write towards a diss chapter. Right now I'm going through some of the theoretical texts that are foundational to my working theory of literacy education, development and research. I haven't been cross-posting my current series on Pierre Bourdieu and Literacy as Activity, but if you want to check it out here's Part I, Part II, and Part III.
Right now it's not that important whether these series add up to actual chapters. They're useful, if for nothing else, in practicing articulating the thoughts I'm having and practicing talking about my (REALLY raw) data.
So that's what I'm up to, folks.
The data collection officially ends in May. Then I'll start with the grueling tasks of interpreting and making sense of it all. Though it will no doubt be tedious, I'll be thrilled to actually reach this stage of production!
