Basecamp, a lovely organizational tool for groups that are working together on the web, now offers and ftp service for its paid plans, which I think makes it much more useful (you don’t need your own ftp server).
New to Basecamp? In short: it’s a great way to work together with a team of people on a projects that have lots of little deadlines. It’s also nice for keeping track of personal projects. Great for freelancers and nonprofits for use as a private just-add-water network. It’s not open source, and only the single-project plan is free, but it sure is easy to use. Go get some good done.
Perhaps not what you’ve been waiting for all year — an extensive resource for researching various qualitative data analysis programs — but if you’re in a research environment, this is actually extremely helpful.
This page is from a university in the U.K., and would be useful if you’re about to sink a few hundred dollars in some software (which will in turn play an important part in your research, of course.)
Research it: CAQDAS (New Media Methods @ Loughborough University)
Techsoup just announced that they have Symantec Antivirus with multiple user licenses for under $100. (Single user licenses start at $100.) If you haven’t priced antivirus software, well, that’s a bad sign. Unless your’e on a Mac, but that’s a different post.
Bottom line is that you shouldn’t be paying anything near full price for software if you have 501(c)3 status to flash. Check out the other stuff they have, most notably Alpha 5 (PC Magazines “best database” of the year), Macromedia Contribute 3 (excellent cheap way to run your website) and Dreamweaver (great web development environment). They also have Microsoft and Cisco software for a pittance.
Check it out under the Techsoup Stock tab at the top of their page:
TechSoup - The Technology Place for Nonprofits: ”
Do you work with interviews or documents in which you have to make meaningful correlations between themes?
Perhaps you have a lot of data from interviews and you want to know what your respondents associate with a problem.
Atlas.Ti isn’t new, but you may have missed the boat. It provides a visual way of organizing and coding data for this type of research projects, especially those involving qualitative data, or data that can’t be understood using traditional statistical methods.
All the best research, right?
It’s relatively easy to learn, fun to use, and incredibly powerful in the right context.
For a few years now, it has had increasingly powerful support for video and audio coding, which means that you can analyze data from almost any source imaginable. Here’s a blurb:
“ATLAS.ti serves as a powerful utility for qualitative analysis, particularly of larger bodies of textual, graphical, audio, and video data. The content or subject matter of these materials is in no way limited to any one particular field of scientific or scholarly investigation. The typical application areas for ATLAS.ti are characterized by a systematic, yet creative approach to analyzing unstructured data.”
Visit the atlas website.