EPL 692 Tools Review

Among all the tools covered in EPL 692, I found the following particularly useful for future research.

Zotero will be my primary bibliographic manager, although I just found that I had a RefWorks account established in Fall 2008 (How come I forget about this?). Moviemaker is another tool I will definitely use- maybe start from making a short movie for my nephew’s birthday! Audacity and ExpressScribe are the tools I will use for audio-only interviews and transcriptions. I might consider buying Transana if I have videos to be transcribed and coded. WEFT QDA will assist me in analyzing data once I pass my candidacy (hopefully within a year). Wikipedia is a good friend of mine. Use it almost every day- just as a reader, never as an editor. Maybe I will put myself into the latter role someday. Zamzar is a good conversion program. I once used it to convert a student’s paper into a .doc when he saved it as a .wps. The only thing I don’t like about it is the several pop-up advertisement windows accompanied whenever I visit the website. Survey Monkey is an interesting tool- I am sure I will use it more often next quarter, since I will be enrolled for EPL 807, a course focusing on surveys.

I am trying Google Wave, which kind of combines e-mails, instant messaging, wiki, social networks, blog comments, and more together. I think it can be a powerful tool for collaborative researchers since it incorporates various sources of information into one application product and allows multiple participants to work on the same tasks together simultaneously.

DiRT is a good resource to go to if I want to know new tools for digital research. Of course I will visit the EPL 692 blog for new information as well.

WEFT QDA

For a novice researcher who has not had a detailed research plan, picking up a free CAQDAS seems to be the most economical and reasonable step to take. I downloaded WEFT QDA 1.0.1 to see how data analysis software can help a researcher. Without enough transcript data at hand, I only tried some basic functions of WEFT, including how to import documents, build new projects, create a category, and do a text search. Queries and code reviews are a little bit complicated- I guess they will make sense to me if I have more data ready for another try later. After all, those functions are closely related to key words, which take some time to create from scratch.


Here are my thoughts after partially exploring WEFT QDA and reading the manual.

What I like about WEFT QDA:

1. Free
2. Simple for use (no fancy or advanced functions- good for rookies like me)
3. The marked text can be copied and pasted into other desktop applications. This is helpful for writing and editing text in a Word document.
4. Each cell within the Code Review grid is tinted more or less strongly based on the number of documents in which the coding of the relevant categories coincides. This gives the researcher a good summary of documents distribution based on certain criteria. What is more, one can jump from a cell in a Code Review table to see the text passages that correspond to that cell. A time-saving grouping function.
5. Relatively stable
6. Low CPU usage

What I don’t like about WEFT QDA:

1. The color of the workarea is boring. Gray makes the whole analysis process doomed and dull. It would be great if users can change the background color as they wish (I prefer light green).
2. It only supports the analysis of textual material, leaving out other forms of data such as images and diagrams (I guess NVivo is an alternative).
3. It seems that users cannot do special format such as bold, color, or different-sized type for texts imported. This may increase the number of categories created since key words or some important information highlighted in original documents will look like the rest of the text.
4. Search results do not automatically update themselves when new documents are added to the project.
5. It seems that the researcher are forced to choose nouns or adjective as key words for search, since WEFT QDA cannot find "help", "helped" or "helping" simultaneously.