New Tools and Techniques for Qualitative Research: Exploring the Challenges and Pitfalls

Organisers

Dr Mike Fraser, University of Bristol, UK

Dr Jon Hindmarsh, Kings College London, UK

Andy Crabtree & Dr Chris Greenhalgh, University of Nottingham, UK

Dr Marina Jirotka, University of Oxford, UK

Dr Matthew Chalmers, University of Glasgow, UK

Organiser Biographies

Mike Fraser is a Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol. He designs, builds and studies the use of novel technologies to support public and social interaction. These include distributed, physically active, haptic, mobile and ubiquitous systems in a variety of settings. He is currently a Principal Investigator on two EPSRC grants and one ESRC grant, and has completed projects funded by the ESRC and EU. He is a member of the research committee of the National Centre for e-Social Science and the e-Science Usability Task Force and is Principal Investigator of the Mixed Media Grid e-Social Science Research Node.

Jon Hindmarsh is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Management at King’s College London and is a member of the Work, Interaction and Technology research group. He specialises in video-based field studies of work and organisation and often uses these studies to inform the design of new technologies. He has been co-investigator on a number of projects funded by the ESRC and the EU, he co-edited Workplace Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and is currently Co-Director of Mixed Media Grid, an e-Social Science Research Node developing new tools to support collaborative research in video-based social science.

Andy Crabtree is Principal Research Fellow at the School of Computer Science & IT, University of Nottingham. He has an academic background in philosophy and sociology and has conducted a wide range of ethnomethodological ‘studies of work’ in offices, libraries, tourist centres, the home, virtual environments, and ubiquitous computing environments as part of academic and commercial research. These studies have been employed to understand the socially organized character of everyday activities and to inform the development of collaborative computing systems. He is author of the book Designing Collaborative Systems: A Practical Guide to Ethnography (Springer, 2003) and is Co-Director of the DReSS e-Social Science Research Node.

Chris Greenhalgh is a Professor in the School of Computer Science & IT at Nottingham University and is a Principal Investigator in the Mixed Reality Laboratory. His areas of research include all aspects of collaborative virtual environment (CVE) technology, mobile/ubiquitous computing and Grid/eScience. He is the creator of multi-user distributed virtual reality systems and is currently working on a more general distributed application framework called EQUIP. He has been principal and co-investigator on a number of projects funded by the EPSRC and the EU. His thesis was a winner of the 1998 BCS/CPHC Distinguished Dissertations in Computer Science competition, published by Springer.

Marina Jirotka is Lecturer in Requirements Engineering at Oxford University Computing Laboratory, Director of the Centre for Requirements and Foundations and Associate Director of the Oxford e-Science Centre. Her main areas of research have been in developing novel techniques for requirements capture drawn from the social sciences. In recent years her research has focused on requirements for e-Science applications, particularly e-Health. She is co-director of the e-Social Science node ‘Oxford e-Social Science (OeSS)’; Co-Investigator on ‘Copyright ownership of medical data in collaborative computing environments’; and a member of the UK e-Science Usability Task Force.

Matthew Chalmers is a Reader in Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. Previously he worked at Xerox PARC, Xerox EuroPARC, UBS Ubilab and the University of Hokkaido. His work aims to take account of social and perceptual issues both in the design of computer systems, in visualization, recommender systems and ubiquitous computing, and in the theory of computer science, relating contemporary semiology/philosophy to computational representation. He is a Principal Investigator in Equator, involved in collaborative ubicomp systems in the Seamful Games project, and related conceptual work and also works on information visualization, especially in non-linear multidimensional scaling algorithms. He is the Principal Investigator on an e-social science small grant entitled "Integrating Field and Systemic Data in a Visualization for collaboration".