I just last week downloaded the trial version of NVivo 7, and after a day of playing with it decided to buy the full licence (which is not cheap, even at the student discount, so I hope it’s going to be worth it).

NVivo is a qualitative data analysis tool, which adds codes to data for tracking ideas and arguments that occur in conversations. It’s designed mainly for transcripts of interviews and focus group discussions. But I’ve found it works really well for blog posts.

It has a auto-coding system based on heading styles formatted to transcripts. So transcribing a set of blog posts (and their comments) to a document would have the following style:

Blogger/commenter

Tag or category

Date/timestamp of blog post or comment

I’ve found that by formatting blog posts like this and hitting the autocode button I will get a whole pile of blog posts arranged according to who said what and in what discussion. That way I can compare ideas and arguments happening between the tags applied by each blogger, and keep an eye of discussions occuring across a range of blogs.

NVivo I think will work for me, but there are literally hundreds of records to transcribe, and I’ve never known such tedium. Last night I experienced for the first time the phenomenon of cut/pasting while dozing. Nvivo also requires a lot of hertz (at least 1Gig) and a fiar bit of disk space. I’m only through a few blogs right now and the file is already a few dozen MB. It’s made the cut/pasting slow and adds to the tedium. The only thing pulling me through it is that I’m finally getting to read everyone’s comments to everyone’s blog posts, and not just the posts themselves. So I’m watching a real community of people engaged in risky, heartfelt and humble conversations.