[Air-L] Visualization tool for conversations?

[gus andrews]

Thanks for all the tips, everyone! I'll definitely look into the
things mentioned. Jennifer Stromer, your tool sounds like it might be
suited for my data -- Herring's work has been useful to my own -- so I
will be in touch.

Regarding Atlas.TI, it is also what I've been using to code my data,
in part because their student price for the software is $100, which is
lovely of them (and probably a good marketing strategy-- "the first
one is [almost] free!"). I like Atlas ok as qualitative coding
software. I couldn't figure out its autocoding feature, which would
have been useful for coding blog comments as they have a standard
shape. Though Atlas's boolean and grep searching techniques are
counterintuitive and involve a steep learning curve, those have proved
pretty useful. I am generally exporting data from Atlas.TI into
ManyEyes ( http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/ ) for my visualizations
at the moment.

Visualization-wise, Atlas.TI promises but does not deliver. As far as
I can tell, the only visualizations you can do with it at the moment
are network visualizations of the categories/codes you've developed
yourself! The software does not seem to provide any tools for
visualizing data. It's pretty puzzling why they've made it that way.
I'm hoping they'll incorporate some real data visualization tools in
the future.

cheers,
Gus Andrews

> BTW, Tracy suggested Atlas.ti. I've mucked around quite a bit with
> Atlas' visualization tool. It's clunky, and in the end abandoned my
> efforts to use that to track interactions. I think it's useful if you're
> hoping to visualize small segments of interaction. But, my data sets
> tend to be relatively large, making the Atlas approach quite labor
> intensive.