Using Technology Tools to Assist Research Process

Dear fellow digital researchers,

This isn't a long message, but one that might help spark a thought for some of you. My project involves going through blogs and forums and analyzing the main topics each person addressed in the post. I've printed them out, highlighted, made notes, but still needed a more concise way of approaching the task.

We have so many tools available to us and sometimes don't considering using the tools in a different format. In addition to Business Writing, I teach an Intro Information Systems class and have recently used Access to solve multiple problems in a database for versatility in preparing reports. Suddenly the light bulb came on to consider Excel for this project.

So, I've created some columns and inputted key information such as whether or not the post was the first post or a reply post, topic of post, name, and date. This will allow me to sort in multiple ways. As I analyze any document, I can then manipulate it in a variety of ways. The end result is that I become more comfortable and also can observe the data from different perspectives.

This was one of those "seems so simple - why didn't I think of it earlier" moments. I know we'll be studying several different software tools available in the next few weeks, but this has helped me.

D.Burleson