First Experience with ATLAS.ti

ATLAS.ti is a qualitative data analysis tool by ATLAS.ti Scientific Software Development GmbH. [http://www.atlasti.com]

Collecting data automatically
I played with ATLAS.ti with my data in a lab in UCSUR [http://www.ucsur.pitt.edu/]. I gathered the data from a blog, Information Aesthetics [http://infosthetics.com/]. Since the blog has almost 730 posts on information visualization, I decided to code a program to collect them automatically. The program collects web pages from predefined list of URLs, parse those web pages with Jericho html parser [http://jerichohtml.sourceforge.net/], and save extracted text and images into a RTF file throughout iText which is a free java-PDF library [http://www.lowagie.com/iText/].

Supports RTF but PDF
Since PDF format is widely used on the web, I thought that ATLAS.ti would support PDF but it doesn't support PDF format. Thus, I saved collected data with Rich Text Format (RTF) supported by ATLAS.ti. In my first RTF file, not only text but also images are included. When I opened the files in ATLAS.ti, I could see only text not images. ATLAS.ti doesn't support both text and image at the same time. To solve this problem, I had to separate text from images so that I saved each images into different files with different names.

Coding
I tried to code some concepts. With the experience, it is, currently, questionable how to make good codes. However, I expect to get sound understanding on that.

Guest Speaker - Sue Sterrett

Bridging the Gap: A Study of Interdiciplinary
Sue Sterrett


She used qualitative research method in her study. In her pilot study, journaling and survey are used to collect and analysis qualitative and quantitative data. She gave open questions to the subjects and asked them to write a personal journal on those questions. After collecting those journals, she analyzed those contents with NVIVO. Analyzing them, she represented the concept relations found in the contents with tree model.


Finding

• Journaling, which can capture the subjects’ inside view or behavior, is one of qualitative research methods.
  
• Tree map is used to draw conceptual relations. Is tree mapping the only way to do it? Tree map is so hierarchical that it cannot represent poly-hierarchical structure which can be represented with network model. Is tree map sufficient to represent conceptual relations for qualitative analysis? I’m not sure. I am just thinking about other possibilities. Tree map seems to be good for classifying concepts or knowledge. However, concepts relations might be more complex.
  
• Automatic coding vs. manual coding: Most Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDS) provide options for automatic concept coding or indexing. Sue coded concepts manually. In my opinion, manual coding seems to be more accurate because it can reduce errors by involving researcher’s understanding to the process. On the other hands, automatic coding would be helpful to process a lot of data and to find patterns or rules which are difficult to be found with manual coding.
  
• Polarization is dangerous when a researcher uses qualitative and quantitative research methods together because the paradigm of one research method is quite different from that of another. For example, qualitative research has post-modern view which sees things from various angle or value. However, quantitative research is based on absoluteness. Then, how can we compromise those together in a research?