As always, the end of the spring semester comes more quickly than we anticipate. Next week is the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry and once again we have a very robust program of presentations related to Digital Tools for Qualitative Research. We are particularly excited about the “wiki hack” we are collaborating on with the University of Illinois librarians. Our special issue on Digital Tools in Qualitative Inquiry (papers from previous ICQI meetings) should be out in June or July, and I will share that news here.

Kate Guthrie, a student from last summer’s Digital Tools course recently told me that she and some other students (including Will Fassbender and Morgan Bryant who took the same course) presented at the Integrative Ideas and Research Conference on the UGA campus back in March. Their session, “Emerging digital tools in research preparation, collection, analyzation, and publication” had several objectives:

• Share diverse applications of digital tools and software available for graduate student researchers.
• Provide digital tool suggestions for managing one’s workflow while conducting research.
• Demonstrate how qualitative data analysis software can aid in conducting a paperless literature review, transcribe audio and video files, and code for common themes.
• Learn how both quantitative and qualitative software can capture and analyze social media data.
• Showcase a variety of digital tools including NVivo, MAXQDA 12, Dedoose, NodeXL, SAS, R, and more.

You can see the entire IRIS conference program here.

UGA is one of this year’s sponsors of the IIQM Master Class Webinar series, and my colleagues Jori Hall and Melissa Freeman are presenting, as well as my frequent collaborators Nick Woolf, Christina Silver and Jessica Lester. If you aren’t familiar with the series, I recommend checking out the abstracts and attending the ones of interest to you.

Our special issue on the Microanalysis of Online Data is now in press with the Journal of Pragmatics. This was the culmination of a few years of symposia with the MOOD network and it is rewarding to have seen this to fruition. In addition to being a co-editor, I had the pleasure of working with Wyke Stommel and David Atkins on a study of how hyperlinks function in service-oriented chats (library chat reference interactions and online counseling interactions.) You can see our abstract here.

I had the pleasure of speaking (via Zoom) to Dr. Kakali Bhattacharya’s qualitative research class about Digital Tools this semester, and the students had great questions about selecting QDA software and how they might be used for literature reviews. Stay tuned – Jennifer Lubke, Ginny Britt, David Atkins and I just got our page proofs for “Hacking the Literature Review: Opportunities and Innovations to Improve the Research Process” back from Reference & User Services Quarterly. I will share the link once it is online.

Speaking of librarians, last week I was invited back to the University of Tennessee libraries to give a presentation on “The Research Interview”. I enjoyed seeing some familiar faces and also meeting new librarians and working together on identifying the assumptions underlying the questions we ask, and thinking about how those assumptions might impact the responses we get from our participants.

A primary milestone this summer will be to finish editing the special issue of The Qualitative Report on The Future of QDA Software (with Jeanine Evers and Franciska de Jong), a result of the KWALON Conference last August. We have six submissions under peer review, and we can look forward to a very robust set of papers looking at QDA Software from a variety of angles and across the research process.

This summer I will be upgrading to ATLAS.ti version 8 in preparation for our Summer Workshop Series in Corvallis, Oregon. (And this fall, I’ll be learning the Mac version!) I will be facilitating one day of the workshop, but will be attending all of the Advanced sessions, focusing on how ATLAS.ti (and, really, all QDAS software) can be used across the entire research process.

There are several other writing projects in the works this summer – continuing work with Alyssa Wise on Researching learning, insight and transformation in online talk (Routledge, 2018), finishing our research study of 5LQDA to teach ATLAS.ti (with Liz Pope, Nick Woolf and Christina Silver), submitting our theoretical piece on how conversation analysis can be used to understand learning in online environments (with Jessica Lester and Amber Warren), and continuing my collaboration with Amber on the function of storytelling in online educational discussions, which she will be presenting at  IPRA 2017 as part of the Jo Meredith, David Giles and Wyke Stommel’s MOOD panel. Kathy Roberts and I will also be resubmitting our analysis of medical campaigns on GoFundMe – we received good feedback from a highly competitive journal, but are still looking for that magical “revise and resubmit!”

Enjoy the summer, everyone – in addition to writing I hope to do a lot of hiking, and I hope to see some you in Urbana, Corvallis, or on the trail.

Sanity break.