Atlas.ti v.6 Warning

mbietz April 27th, 2009

If you use Atlas.ti software, be careful when upgrading! Version 6 is not backward compatible.

I really like Atlas.ti for qualitative analysis, but I pretty annoyed by my recent experience. I have a license which includes upgrades, and a few weeks ago received a message that I should upgrade from version 5.5 to version 6. The new features looked great (including direct PDF import and interface improvements) so I loaded the new version. I didn’t discover until after I had installed that the new version uses a new file format and could not save files in the v.5 format. The lab I’m in specifically chose Atlas.ti for its collaboration features, but if you share your files with others, they must be using the same version of the software.

When I tried to find out if there was something I was missing, I discovered that Atlas.ti has published the v.6 software upgrade, but has not yet upgraded the manual. I guess we’re supposed to intuit what all the new icons mean and how to use the completely new features.

I have uninstalled v.6 and gone back to using v.5.

CFP: Supporting Scientific Collaboration Through Cyberinfrastructure and e-Science

mbietz April 9th, 2009

Call for Papers Special Issue of JCSCW

Guest Editors: Charlotte P. Lee, David Ribes, Matthew Bietz , Marina Jirotka, and Helena Karasti

Scientific collaboration using cyberinfrastructure (CI), or e-Science, is forward facing. e-Science projects aim to support the collaboration of research communities, whether by facilitating distanced collaboration or sharing data and computational resources. The most ambitious e-Science projects are creating entirely novel scientific fields, anticipating and actively cultivating new scientific communities and practices. Such endeavors present original challenges to researchers in CSCW fields: questions of large-scale technology development, of supporting communities in addition to groups, and of long-term sustainability.

Cyberinfrastructure and e-Science projects are partially information technology research ventures, but they are also forms of applied sociology, e.g., building bridges across heterogeneous disciplinary traditions and scientific methods. Careful attention must be paid to the full range of participant’s activities as they go about their work. How to establish reliable, accessible and appropriate information infrastructure is a challenge for contemporary CSCW.

For this special issue on computer supported scientific collaboration, we welcome research on topics such as, but not limited to: case studies or comparative analyses of cyberinfrastructure & e-Science development or use; novel applications for large-scale scientific collaboration; and practices for supporting heterogeneous, distributed, or long-term collaborations. We seek empirically grounded studies with a sensibility for theoretical contributions to CSCW and closely related fields.

Schedule and Submission Process

October 1, 2009……….. Deadline for submission of manuscripts
November 1, 2009……. Notification of acceptance
January 15, 2009……… Submission of finished manuscripts
2010………………………… Publication
   

Instructions for Authors: http://www.springer.com/computer/journal/10606

Submitting Manuscripts: Authors should submit their manuscripts to the Editorial Manager (EM) system (at http://www.editorialmanager.com/cosu/ ). Select the appropriate special issue under Article Type: “Scientific Collaboration Through Cyberinfrastructure”.

About the Journal: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) disseminates innovative research results and provides an interdisciplinary forum for the debate and exchange of ideas concerning theoretical, practical, technical, and social issues in CSCW. Coverage ranges from ethnographic studies of cooperative work to reports on the development of CSCW systems and their technological foundations.

CSC Laboratory Web Site

mbietz March 10th, 2009

ccsclab-swoop-ico-001The Computer Supported Collaboration Laboratory web site is now live!

The story: The CSC Lab is in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington. I’m a postdoc working with Charlotte Lee, who leads the lab. HCDE students get involved with faculty research by participating in for-credit research groups. We’ll be using the lab website to report on our NSF-funded research projects and on the work the students are doing. Check it out!

depts.washington.edu/csclab/

My Facebook Network

mbietz February 17th, 2009

In response to Jude and Eric, I decided to check out my facebook friend network using Nexus.

nexus_fb_friends_spring_labeled

Nothing too surprising here, except what isn’t shown. I have “real” friends who don’t use facebook, but actually serve as connections between clusters. I also have friends who would connect clusters, but only show up in one because they made a conscious decision not to accept friend requests from any high school classmates. The only obvious individual that stands out is my bee-you-tee-full sistore, who connects the fam, high school, and undergrad.

Stimulation

mbietz February 7th, 2009

I’m bothered by the rhetoric coming out of the debate on the stimulus package. In comments from lawmakers and the press, the arts and sciences rank high in the various lists of pork and “unnecessary spending that will do nothing to stimulate the economy.”

Right now it looks like there might be a deal in the works (with $110 billion cut from the bill), but as the NY Times is reporting, “The fine print was not immediately available, and the numbers were shifting.” But according to Talking Points Memo, the cuts proposed by a “centrist” group led by Senators Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Susan Collins (R-ME) include $500m from the USDA (including $100m specifically for research),$750m from NASA, $427m from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), $100m from the Dept. of Energy Office of Science, and $1.4 billion from the National Science Foundation. Politico is reporting different numbers, but mostly in the same categories.

There are some really complicated economic arguments to be made, and questions about funding through “emergency” bills or the regular budget process. But the discussion instead centers on things like, why on earth should we worry about honeybees? Or the suggestion that the arts and sciences have no real economic impact.

For me there’s an obvious economic impact: the NSF is the entire reason I’m not drawing an unemployment check. I’m still hopefull that the Obama era will be different from the Bush years, but I think that we in academia aren’t doing a good enough job of explaining why and how what we do is necessary on a larger scale.

Recording Phone Interviews

mbietz January 31st, 2009

I’ve been doing a lot of phone interviews for a study of Collaboration in Cyberinfrastructure, and many of them require international calls. In the past I’ve recorded interviews by putting a sound recorder with a microphone next to a speakerphone, using a special thingamabob that you can plug your phone cord into and it has an audio out, or using one of those weird suction cup doohickeys. All of them result in pretty low-quality recordings.

Recently I’ve been getting really good results with a combination of Skype and the MX Skype Recorder. MXSR only works on Windows systems, and it’s not free (although even grad students should be able to afford $14.95 for the standard version). There are a number of Skype recording solutions out there, but MXSR has a couple of features I really like.

First of all, it just works. I tested several other packages where, even after trying all the workarounds, I still couldn’t get a recording. I’ve been using MXSR on 3 different machines with both Vista and XP, and haven’t had any problems.

Second, it allows you to record the incoming and outgoing audio to different channels. Phone calls are mono - it doesn’t matter if you use both left and right channels for the sound. But by putting my voice on the right channel and the person I’m interviewing on the left, transcribing suddenly becomes much easier. Any time there’s cross-talk or interruptions, I can listen to each voice separately, and then it is trivial to sort out what each person said.

Of course, you have to pay to call land lines from Skype, but the rates are great, especially for international calls.

Anyone else tried this, or have a similar solution for other platforms?

Image courtesy of Goopymart.

A New Name

mbietz January 29th, 2009

The Department of Technical Communication at the University of Washington (where I am a Research Scientist) is changing its name! We are now the Department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering. The name change represents a broader focus than traditional written communication, and better reflects the interests of many of the faculty and students.

The press release about the name change also mentions the effort to coordinate the human-computer interaction work going on all over campus. I remember when I started working in this area at the University of Michigan School of Information, and worrying that it was all so new and might not catch on and I’d be an academic outcast wandering in the interdisciplinary desert. Sometimes it still feels that way, but it’s great to know that there are oases where research on the human side of computing is in full bloom!

Being Thankful

mbietz November 27th, 2008

Nice post today by Jonathan Eisen about What Scientists Should Be Thankful For. A great list. “8. Study Subjects or Objects” seems especially important for those of us in the social sciences. I’d never be able to do what I do without the kindness and patience and time of a lot of very busy people. So to everyone who has ever shown up in my lab or sat down for an hour to talk to me, Thank You!

Scientific Collaboration on the Internet

mbietz November 14th, 2008

Scientific Collaboration on the Internet

The Scientific Collaboration on the Internet book has (finally) been published. Check out my chapter (with Gary Olson and Marsha Naidoo) on the work we did with international AIDS research collaborations.

From the MIT Press website:

Modern science is increasingly collaborative, as signaled by rising numbers of coauthored papers, papers with international coauthors, and multi-investigator grants. Historically, scientific collaborations were carried out by scientists in the same physical location—the Manhattan Project of the 1940s, for example, involved thousands of scientists gathered on a remote plateau in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Today, information and communication technologies allow cooperation among scientists from far-flung institutions and different disciplines. Scientific Collaboration on the Internet provides both broad and in-depth views of how new technology is enabling novel kinds of science and engineering collaboration. The book offers commentary from notable experts in the field along with case studies of large-scale collaborative projects, past and ongoing.

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