| Exploiting Digital Records: New Resources and Tools for Qualitative Research in Contemporary Social Science (2008) | |||||||||||||||
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| Synopses. A wide range of computational tools are currently available for use within qualitative research, 1 yet very few of these have actually been designed to support the diverse needs of the social sciences. Tools offered for qualitative research have been developed across education, nursing, disease control, animal behaviour, time and motion study, and (by far the largest category) generic document and text analysis, for example. The consequence is that many of the qualitative software tools offered by developers are of extremely limited value to social science researchers. A much smaller number of software packages than initially meets the eye actually respond to the needs of the qualitative social scientist. Tools such as Anvil and Atlas enable the social science researcher to exploit text, photography, audio, and video and support widespread practices of annotation and coding. The emergence of Grid computing (Foster et al. 2001) raises new possibilities for social science research. The Grid, with its emphasis on high performance computing, naturally lends itself to quantitative research. The vision, however, is beguiling as even large-scale surveys produce computationally trivial amounts of data (Crabtree and Rouncefield 2005); indeed, qualitative datasets rich in multimedia are routinely larger than their quantitative | |||||||||||||||
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