I’m almost done. About a month to oral defence. But, here are the tools I used to gather data, process it, whip up visualizations, and write the thesis:
- Papers (for storing the 598 papers I worked through during the process).12
- Dropbox (for having the files available on any computer I’m using, storing revisions, and making me not freak out about backups)3
- Noteshelf - best notebook iPad app I’ve used. Did CoI coding data in it. Tracked progress in it. Sketched visualization ideas in it. Etc…
- SurveyMonkey (for the online survey. wish I hadn’t used it, though, because I didn’t spring for a paid license and my data was trapped)
- a custom HTML page and CGI processor hosted by UCalgary for gathering ethics consent from participants
- Chrome (save web page… provided the online discussion archives)
- BBEdit (for processing the discussion archives)
- Excel (for storing the metadata and coding data, processing the data, and generating some visualizations)4
- Gephi (for playing with visualizing online communities - wound up dropping most of those from the thesis, though)
- OmniGraphSketcher (for creating many of the visualizations. FANTASTIC app for playing with data visualization)
- OmniGraffle Pro (for the concept map visualization and some supporting media)
- Acorn (for processing all graphics)
- iPhone Voice Recorder app (for recording instructor interview)
- VLC (for playing the instructor interview slowly without going mental)
- Word (for writing the thing)
- WordPress (category on my blog for running notes on journal articles)
- likely a handful of other handy apps thrown in for good measure
The irony… my thesis basically boils down to “it’s not the tool, it’s how you use it.” And I write a “these are the tools I used” post…
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Used the Mac, iOS and Windows versions, synced via Dropbox (and then gave up on syncing because my library was too fracking big) ↩︎
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the search tool in Papers is awesome. I found stuff in it that was difficult or impossible to find elsewhere, and the library proxy support was a HUGE timesaver. ↩︎
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raw online discussion data didn’t go here because of ethics implications - I’d said that would only be secured on my home computer ↩︎
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pivot tables are magic, or science fiction. I was amazed at how easy it was to play with the data once it was all normalized into a spreadsheet. yeah, not a hardcore True Database. Whatever. Did the job. ↩︎