I'm torn.
I have to admit to LOVING having scanned everything I am reading for lit. review / dissertation. Using Acrobat, I can highlight, add notes, have searchable text, and my scribblings can be immortalized in my PDF and tucked away nicely in Mendeley, searchable and all!
BUUUUT.....
I can't really synthesize anything beyond that, which I find VERY annoying. There is no way I am going to keep links I saw, gaps I realized, etc. straight in my dysfunctional brain.
I am going to credit J.L. for giving me the novel-to-me thought of the potential of using Atlas.ti for facilitating the lit. review process. I don't remember whether she was explicit about it or whether I just noticed it as she was taking us through her data, but it led me to feed "literature review in atlas.ti" into the gaping jaws of the Google, which then gave me this article straight from Atlas.ti, as well as this PDF on using NVIVO for the lit. review. I agree with the premise that the act of formulating arguments and research questions from a body of literature mirrors the qualitative data analysis process. You read, reflect, and interact with the literature, identify themes, compare and contrast ideas and strands from different works, and construct arguments with links to supporting evidence in the literature. What's not to love?
Thinking that I had just made my life infinitely easier, I plugged a PDF into Atlas.ti. I was excited when I saw my highlights made in Acrobat show up on the PDF in Atlas.ti...then less excited when I noticed that my embedded notes did not make the cut on the import. Then, I got to thinking about all of this wonderful mental light that would play colorfully upon these documents, and how I was going to save it in something like Mendeley...Holy qualitative quandry, how AM I going to export ANY of this into something durable?
Now what do I do?
What would you do?
What do you think?
2 comments:
Just typed out a huge comment which blogger promptly ate with an error message.
To recap: I struggle with this same question, but I feel much less bad after attending Naomi Baron's talk at GURT last week (Print or Onscreen: Better, Worse, or About the Same?) She collected survey data showing that even undergrads prefer reading printed texts when it comes to scholarly academic reading. I will no longer try to force myself to move on screen for reading/synthesizing literature - it's just not the same and I know how to think through my reading/lit reviews on paper, not online, and that's okay. I also look forward to talking more about this during my summer class.
Fortunately, my struggle is not one of paper vs. bits...Paper is generally anathema to me, so I'm not altogether certain we're talking apples and apples here. My issue is one of wishing I could take my PDF with all of its coded goodness out of atlas.ti can drop it into a referencing program like Endnote or Mendeley. I can't do that. But, if I use Acrobat, I can store in Mendeley, but then I lose some of the advantages of coding the literature review in atlas.ti.
I guess it comes down to the fact that I feel like I'm at a crossroads here. I want the advantages that Atlas offers, but I'm afraid to throw my hat over the wall for fear that they won't wake up to the advantages of social research sites and I'll be forever stuck with all of my clarity bound up in a system that chooses not to be interoperable. but I'm leaning in that direction, because I need all the help I can get.
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