It seems every time I embark on the qualitative data analysis (QDA) stage of a project, I get frustrated by QDA software. My approach to data analysis is iterative and collaborative. Existing QDA makes both of those approaches obscenely difficult (if possible at all). Hence my frustration. I want to be able to edit...
Read more →You can tell by today’s posts that I’m getting something started on EC2. You can also read what’s already installed on the free instance or how to get started. PHP and MySQL are not installed on the free instance, so this post is about getting setup so I can run 140dev’s excellent Twitter Database...
Read more →I’ve been having trouble finding out what’s installed and/or running on the free Amazon EC2 instance, so I’ll use this post to list the processes and installs as I uncover them. Default versions of stuff I use: Python 2.6.6 ruby 1.8.7 (2010-12-23 patchlevel 330) (You’ll need to install Rubygems yourself)
Read more →All of my research is collaborative. Even on my “own” projects, I rely on others to help me polish drafts of publications and usually to talk about my data. Getting my colleagues that data is harder than it ought to be. Usually, my data consist of interview transcripts, interview audio recordings, video recordings, and...
Read more →Today’s John Seely Brown Symposium had an active Twitter hashtag of #danahjsb. I imported the hashtag network* into NodeXL and had it draw up a graph for me (click the image for a giant BMP version): Image size depends on the user’s number of followers. Edge color depends on the kind of edge –...
Read more →Jeremy Whitlock has a great blog post about how to set up your OS X-based Subversion server. His post includes instructions for Apache configs, but not for svn+ssh. When you type svn+ssh://user@host/repos you’ll likely get an error such as svn: Expected FS format '2'; found format '4' which means that you’re repository was created...
Read more →I’m using Word 2007 and RefWorks, including the Write-N-Cite III Word plug in. I don’t want any crap from you LaTeX users. Yes, I know how to use LaTeX. No, I didn’t pick it for my dissertation. Moving on. Rackham, the graduate school at the University of Michigan, has arcane and ugly formatting requirements...
Read more →Bernard Lund wrote a column (article?) for ReadWriteWeb recently that listed 10 reasons Skype is the biggest Web 2.0 winner. “Web 2.0″ doesn’t even make sense anymore, but let’s set that aside. Lund’s article is interesting even without the “Web 2.0″ buzzword. For instance, he points out that Skype is profitable. Profitable is surely...
Read more →I picked up a discarded Fast Company magazine at the YMCA today, and in it I found a great article about Chris Hughes. Hughes was a Facebook co-founder and left to join the Obama campaign where he was responsible for the innovative social networking tools available on My.BarackObama.com. I don’t know much about how...
Read more →Sometimes we ask users to enter a date range. I wrote some code today to check whether the date a user entered was (1) after today and (2) before some other date she entered. In my situation, I was building a flight search form and wanted to check that the user-entered departure date was...
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