Bruce Mason, <[log in to unmask]> wrote of his dream system: (at end)
Birrell Walsh replied:
This sounds suspiciously like HyperCard for the Macintosh, or its
supersets (SuperCard et al.). They are not Qual Software, but it would
be very very easy to do most of what the above spec calls for with these
products.
I would certainly agree with Bruce that no single program currently exists
that can do all of what Bruce outlines (at end of this message), but in
part this is the wrong approach to research material. No single application
(short of a programming language and a lot of coding ability) can ever
fulfill all the needs of a range of research projects. Of those available I
agree that Atlas TI is probably the best for windows.
However Birrell highlights the real issue. Hypercard is not a hypertext or
hypermedia application, it is a tool building environment that will indeed
do most of the things set out in conjunction with other tools. Research
using computers is better done using a more modular approach where a number
of different, rather simple programs, can be used to support each other
rather than trying to define a single program of the one size fits all
variety.
This is the approach generally taken with unix and Macintosh OSs. It is
theoretically possible within the Windows 95/8 and NT OSs, though
apparently this is not a part of the user culture of these OS.
Hypercard together with other modular tools can do a lot. However, lately
we have been taking a more www based approach (beginning to set up projects
with continuous dissemination. A mixed bag, but look around
http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk). The www approach has the additional advantage of
being collaborative accross different platforms, which hypercard cannot
easily be.
I do substantially what Bruce is talking about on a Mac using the following
programs (which are also available for windows):
Visual Page (Symantec) -- html WISIWYG editor with excellent drag and drop
capabilities (available for windows and mac)
Movie Star Maker (Intelligence at Large) -- an excellent utility for
constructing Quicktime movies from a range of sources - makes video
annotation on a frame to segment basis a snap. (available for windows and
mac)
MoviePlayer (Apple) free ware with sufficient power to make clips from
larger media bases that can then be dragged and dropped into Visual Page
(available for windows and mac)
Site Mill (Adobe) for displaying and modifying the entire hyptertext base
(available for windows and mac)
Project X (apple) another way to view a hypertext base
httpd - a www server (available for windows and mac)
a range of cgi programmes for searching (available for windows and mac)
a range of freeware and shareware tools.
There are a mostly equivalent range of things (with even more power)
I run on a sun ultra 10 workstation, but which are generally
available for Unix with Xwindows (including Linux (freeware), which has the
power to transform a slow outdated windows machine (P200 or less, or even a
486 or 386) into to a powerful piece of hardware).
XEmacs - a very powerful editor with integrate www browser and integrated
programming language (elisp).
Framemaker - cross platform editor with good indexing and hypertext
abilities, images video etc.
xanim - a program for displaying with great control quicktime, avi, mpeg
and other video and sound formats,
xv a power image viewing and manipulation package
apache - a powerful www server that you can run as a private program.
hotjava or netscape - good browsers for unix
+ hundreds of relevant standard unix commands (grep, sgrep) and hundreds of
other tools for working with texts, and comprehenive suites of tools such
as the Humanities toolkit, the Scholars workbench, Unixstat.
Best of all, the above, except for Framemaker, are free, and there are
alternatives for most of them. They work well for the most part, and don't
collapse in a heap about the time something interesting is turning up.
what these tools don't do is set the path you must take - you have the
ability to control the course of your research. The cost is that you have
to learn to use them in a modular way to suit your needs.
This is not as difficult as you might imagine. In the case of unix there
are a lot of little programs, but each one has relatively few 'commands'
and these tend to be focussed on variations on a common theme ... indeed
until a few years ago I used to teach first year university students in
anthropology the UNIX approach (they think they know too much these days,
and want everything done for them, so we do it with Macs now, with a slight
loss of control. The new Mac OS X will remedy this, bringing Unix under the
hood so to speak).
The main point is that when integration is supported by the OS, an
application that meets your needs can be constructed out of tools, when it
provided by a single application, you must suit your research to the
application.
Michael Fischer
Bruce Mason, <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>In terms of qualitative research then I think I'm looking for a
>system that:
>1) handles a range of media (text, graphics, audio, video)
>2) supports sophisticated hyperlinking between these media. In
>essence this requires at least the following:
> i) link categorization, e.g. the ability to name links
> ii) bi-directional linking, e.g. a "return" button
> iii) many-to-one and one-to-many linking.
> iv) "text" to node linking and vice-versa. E.g. the ability in a
>video file to link to a set of frames within that video and, also, to
>set up buttons that are clickable based on the currently playing
>video frames.
>3) Ability to have multiple windows open.
>4) Ability to provide graphical overviews of the complete hypertext
>or subparts of it.
>5) Sophisticated search/query engines.
>
>There are then the "dream" bits such as ability to launch other
>programs (e.g. ability to intergrate with the internet or an
>intranet), collaborative work facilities and so on.
>
>Of course no such program exists. Of the CAQDAS packages ATLAS/ti
>seems closest and of the extant hypertext packages StorySpace seems
>the most useful. However nether supports video and given that the
>majority of our data is likely to be video this is somewhat of a
>major problem. There are sophisticated hypermedia packages out there
>(e..g. Director and AuthorWare) but they're based around slick
>presentation and seem useless for theory building. An initial
>decision to try to use AuthorWare and hack it into something useful
>for data exploring is failing horribly because of its relative
>poverty of hypertext functionality so we are at a bit of a quandry
>here. Hence my email.
>
>---Bruce
>>
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Michael Fischer
Director
Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing
University of Kent at Canterbury
[log in to unmask]
http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/fischer.html
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