i would have lost my mind by now if it weren’t for atlas.ti. i’m working with a corpus of 24 scholarly articles published in information/library science journals, picking out examples of marketing techniques used to promote electronic resources at the authors’ institutions. in addition to keeping a list of the actual techniques i’m interested in recounting the authors’ words in my summary, to help keep the techniques in context with the institutions. i started this in excel and it soon got out of control, all that copying and pasting into cells, and the inevitable scrolling. with atlas.ti i’m able to put the text of the 24 articles into the program, highlight the text i want to capture, and give that highlighted text a code that i’ve created. in this way, for example, i’m able to highlight text related to an author’s description of emails that he sends to faculty to market an electronic resource, and then give that text a code of “email.”
when i’m done coding all the texts i can export the codes along with the highlighted text, giving me a list of all the ways “email” has been used to market electronic resources. this will permit me to understand the breadth of how this particular technique is used across the variety of institutions in the articles. doing this in excel would have taken a long time, considering the number of marketing techniques i’m bumping into in the literature.
curious about the program? you can code images, movies and sound, in addition to text. check out their web site, watch a video tutorial, or download a free trial. i’ll be showing the program off if i have time at my upcoming presentation of this research at the electronic resources and libraries conference.
