Using Real-Time Annotations as Qualitative e-Research Metadata
Mike Fraser, Muneeb Shaukat, Serguei Timakov, Jon Hindmarsh, Dylan Tutt, Christian Heath, Anne Manuel, Marie Gibbs and Sally Barnes
Mike Fraser, Muneeb Shaukat, Serguei Timakov
Department of Comp. Sci., University of Bristol,
MVB, Woodland Road, Bristol, BS81UB, UK.
Jon Hindmarsh, Dylan Tutt, Christian Heath
Department of Management, King's College London,
Franklin-Wilkins Building, London, SE1 9NH, UK.
Anne Manuel
Institute for Learning and Research Technology University of Bristol
8-10 Berkeley Square, Bristol, BS8 1HH, UK.
Marie Gibbs and Sally Barnes
Graduate School of Education,
35 Berkeley Square, Bristol, BS8 1JA, UK.
Email address of corresponding author: fraser@cs.bris.ac.uk
Qualitative analyses may emerge over long periods of time, sometimes through re-inspection of old data in a new light, and sometimes over the course of changing research groups and projects. As communication between researchers unfolds over these timescales, it has traditionally been important that researchers retain records of discarded ideas and perspectives related to their data in addition to the lineages of analysis which have been more immediately published. However, predicting which materials and markings might be useful to retain for future use is often a difficult and timeconsuming job. As a result, analysts may have to rely on memory to find and re-study data together, and may lose some potentially useful threads of analysis altogether. Within the MiMeG e-Social Science node, we have been working on ways of recording and storing annotation metadata related to distributed analysis, such that it can be retrieved in later situations and repurposed. Keeping track of research requires i) that we maintain system-wide knowledge of researchers' identities, ii) that we are able to log selected activities, and iii) that we understand how to retrieve sequences of annotation and related data based on serendipity and similarity as well as on memory.
