Smart Qualitative Data: Methods and Community Tools for Data Mark-Up (SQUAD)
(University of Essex & University of Edinburgh)
Aims & Objectives
The main aim of the demonstrator project is to explore methodological and technical solutions for 'exposing' digital
qualitative to make them fully shareable and exploitable.
The five main objectives are:
- to specify and test non-proprietary means of storing and 'marking-up' data using universal (XML) standards and technologies, and propose an XML community standard (schema) that will be applicable to most qualitative data;
- to investigate optimal requirements for contextualising research data (e.g. interview setting and interviewer characteristics), aiming to develop standards for data documentation (extension of the XML schema) and ways of capturing this information;
- to develop and implement fully documented user-friendly tools for semi-automating (through the application of natural language processing technology) some of the very laborious processes already used to prepare qualitative data for both traditional digital archiving and more adventurous collaborative research and e-science type exploitation (e.g. linking multiple data and information sources);
- to research free, non-commercially based tools for publishing (e.g. to the web for online interrogation) and archiving (in XML) marked-up data and associated linked research materials, to be known as Qualitative Data Mark-up Tools (QDMT).
- to provide awareness-raising and basic training provision through the production of easy-to-follow guidelines and user-friendly step-by-step guides with exemplars centred on the use of these tools and the standards they utilise, and produce exemplars of what might constitute a grid-enabled qualitative data collection.
|
