The last two blog post articles were based on a talk I was invited to give at ‘Mind the Gap’, a conference organised by MDH RSA at the University of Sheffield. You can find the slides here, but they are not very text heavy, so don’t read well without audio!   The two talks which preceded me, by Professors Glynis Cousin and John Sandars, echoed quite a few of the themes. Professor Cousin spoke persuasively about

  We live in a world of deep qualitative data.   It’s often proposed that we are very quantitatively literate. We are exposed to numbers and statistics frequently in news reports, at work, when driving, with fitness apps etc. So we are actually pretty good at understanding things like percentages, fractions, and making sense of them quickly. It’s a good reason why people like to see graphs and numerical summaries of data

  The terms ‘unstructured data’ and ‘qualitative data’ are often used interchangeably, but unstructured data is becoming more commonly associated with data mining and big data approaches to text analytics. Here the comparison is drawn with databases of data where we have a defined field and known value and the loosely structured (especially to a computer) world of language, discussion and comment. A qualitative

  On the 23rd and 24th of June, we are running a series of workshops in Sheffield: both at the University of Sheffield, and Sheffield Hallam University. The events are open to students, academics and anyone from the public sector or commercial areas who has an interest in analysing qualitative text.   The first session is on the Tuesday 23rd at 10am, in the Hicks building at the University of Sheffield. In the afternoon there is a

It’s quick and easy to set up an on-line survey to collect feedback or research data in a digital format that means you can quickly get straight to analysing the data. Unfortunately, most packages like SurveyMonkey, SurveyGizmo and Kwiksurveys, while all compatible with Quirkos, require a paying subscription before you can actually export any of your data and analyse it.   However, there are two great free platforms we recommend that