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Hi, I am undertaking a similar exercise for one of the Jisc lists - 5 years worth of discussion. In this instance I contacted Jisc who helpfully zipped together each year's discussion in RTF. This is OK but a significant amount of data cleaning has had to take place in order to remove repetitive threads and the scrambled attachment data. I now intend to use NVivo to code the discussion as it is clear that many respondents hit the 'reply' button to an e-mail to address other topics, so the subject heading of an e-mail is not always representative of the content. Regards, Caroline Cash Research Fellow Learning & Teaching University College Falmouth -----Original Message----- From: qual-software [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Nicholas J.S. Gibson Sent: 29 November 2007 07:56 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Retrieving forum discussions If you use Firefox, then the Zotero plugin could do what you want. See http://www.zotero.org/ . Nicholas Gibson > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2007 16:05:16 +0200 > From: [log in to unmask] > Subject: Retrieving forum discussions > > Do you know of ways to collect information from web discussion boards, > to be later analysed using suitable qual-software? > > If I wished to collect a lot of messages or everything from a single > discussion system, I would probably program some kind of > spider/harvester to collect the info automatically. > > If the idea is to collect info from many different forums while > browsing the net, maybe something like google notebook > (http://www.google.com/notebook/ ) or clipmarks ( > http://www.clipmarks.com/ ) or some orher, perhaps self-made ajax/ > browser plugin type of gizmo could do the trick. > > Or maybe simply just some copy-paste -scheme would be suffficient for > many purposes. > > Any other ideas? > > How about clues for analysing the discussions? In atlas/ti -terms: > what do you think would be the "primary document"? One posting, or a > thread? Or is there some special tricks / programs for just this type > of data? Google notebooks seems to offer tools for "coding on the > fly". > > -Timo Harmo > Computing Coordinator, Fac of Soc Sci, U of Helsinki. Tel 358 09 > 191 24915