KWALON - Volume 21, Issue 1, 2016

Summary

The article serves as an editorial to a special issue on qualitative research in the digital humanities. The author raises a number of questions regarding qualitative research in the digital humanities, and he provides a concise overview of the contributions to the issue and the answers these contributions (implicitly) provide to the questions raised. The article ends with an account of opportunities and challenges, and steps to be taken to enhance the potential of qualitative research in the humanities.

Summary

Due to the digitization of sources, humanities scholars have to develop new research questions and methodologies. This article theorizes the ‘digital turn’ by looking at three challenges: the necessity of combining qualitative and quantitative methods; the dilemma of multidisciplinary cooperation; and the ideological question of why and how the humanities should be concerned with a new digital materiality. We need the expertise of humanities scholars – their critical insights, analytical acuity, and knowledge of ambiguity and diversity – to make sense of a digital culture that permeates and directs our daily life.

Summary

I discuss the dilemma of humanities in the digital age to record interpretations of data, which creates more data that needs to be interpreted. Humanities researchers and machines are tangled in a complex interpretation process: machines mimicking human behaviour and applying this to massive amounts of data. Studying and analysing this process sheds new lights on human interpretation but also on humanities as a discipline.

Summary

An iterative mixed-methods research cycle is proposed as an approach to automatically querying the Semantic Web. To give an indication of what codification of this iterative research cycle could look like in practice, a dynamic iterator pipeline is presented that has been developed for efficient and effective iterative queries of the Semantic Web. The development of the logic of the iterative research cycle could be advanced by providing detailed and systematic answers to the question of how researchers go about answering questions by combining information from different sources on the Web.

Summary

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the ‘state of the art of QDA or CAQDAS software. The author uses Kahneman’s ideas about slow and fast thinking as a framework. Slow thinking in the context of CAQDAS is related to researcher driven analysis and fast thinking to tool- and data driven analysis. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, the author describes trends and new developments and in the second part, she offers a critical appraisal.

Summary

Nowadays, research without a role for digital data and data analysis tools is barely possible. As a result, we see an increasing interest in research data management, as this enables the replication of research outcomes and the reuse of research data for new research activities. Data management planning outlines how to handle data, both during research and after the research is completed. Trusted data repositories are places were research data are archived and made available for the long term. This article covers the state of the art concerning data management and data repository demands with a focus on qualitative data sets.

Summary

The growing availability of historical media-related data and sources in digital form, and the development of tools for searching, analyzing, and visualizing them, provide promising new avenues for media studies research. But the uptake of these data and tools in mainstream media studies is still rather modest. The author argues that exploiting the advantages of computational research is necessary because scholars are already using digital data and tools, and because they will be disadvantaged if they do not critically engage with them. Computational media research requires increased methodological awareness and an improved transparency and responsiveness of data and tools.

Summary

In this contribution the author reviews Digital passages: Migrant youth 2.0 by K. Leurs.

Summary

In this contribution, the author reacts to the review of Rianne Dekker.

Summary

In this contribution, the author reviews Narrative networks: Storied approaches in a digital age by B. Alleyne.

Changes in computer science, information gathering, and the possibilities of the internet continue to vastly influence the way social sciences and humanities are dealing with data collection and analysis. The next KWALON Conference on Qualitative Data Analysis Software aims to organize the reflection on the implications of the recent innovations and trends. Developers and users of software have been invited to reflect on the developments of the past years, and to take them as a starting point for a discussion of the requirements for the future versions of QDA tools. We aim for a fruitful debate between developers and users. Apart from practitioners, trainers, and other end users, participants will include representatives from (in alphabetical order): ATLAS.ti, Cassandre, Dedoose, Feldpartitur, F4 analyse, MAXQDA, NVivo, DiscoverText, QDA Miner and Quirkos.

Reinoud Bosch