16 July - Nvivo 8

I just downloaded Nvivo 8. 30 day free trial. It looks complicated. Most people here rely on Excel. That makes very little sense to me. I watched some Nvivo tutorials and it can record sound and images and all sorts of other things. Possibly even video. A truly multimedia tool. I'm still reading about discourse analysis. Not entirely sure about the whole mailing list thing. I need to justify bounding it to just the mailing lists. I need to figure out how store the text, to import it. I think I need a framework to analyze it and I'm not sure what technique I want to use. Content analysis. Grounded theory. COnversation analysis (mostly not appropriate I think). A strain of discourse analysis? Ethnomethodological analysis? Is that even possible? It must be. The first virtual worlds were purely textual.

I'm having a sad day. I don't wanna really talk about it. But this journal ought to record stuff that's significant. Everything makes me nostalgic. Everything is a reminder. And this is not a good day generally. I just want it all to be over. The sadness. I want a life back. One where I don't spontaneously "leak". It's uncomfortable. Miserable. Much easier to think about data collection.

Ethics of data recording. I've asked the mailing list maintainers for permission to use the archives. Now I think I will just ask the list themselves...

"Hello everyone,

My name is Niamh ("Neave") O Riordan. I'm doing my phd in Second Life. Go me! Anyway, I would like to use these mailing lists as a source of data. I've contacted the list managers to ask permission to use the archives but they haven't responded... Rather than just doing it anyway, I thought I would ask the lists themselves if there is any reason why I should not do this. I want to mine the archives for themes and topics and opinions and issues. I mainly want to count things in order to see trends and patterns in topics over time. I have no interest in identifying anyone...
So, any thoughts??

Sincerely,
Niamh ("Neave") O Riordan
Business Information Systems
University College Cork, Ireland.
SL: Logos Sohl"

I am reading about approaches to narrative analysis in Wood on p. 104: approaches to narrative analysis include social constructionist, literary... blah blah... well, I am so into the social constructionist thing. But I don't quite know how to distinguish it from sybolic interactionism. And I'm not sure that I know much more than the label itself implies... and information processing and cognitive approaches...

Im reading about sociolinguistics and corpus analysis now. It looks more promising. But I know I need to nail down the purpose of the analysis before I can start. And I need to figure out how nvivo works... 30 day trial. And I need to do the stats stuff for tomorrow...