I would like to respond to Patricia’s questions about tools and techniques by reflecting on my journey regarding qualitative data organisation and analysis, from a hierarchical tree-based approach to a wiki-based network approach. Like probably many other qualitative researchers using Windows, I started out with standard software packages from household names that had come pre-installed on my home and university PCs. But as the amount of my collected data grew, and as I started to get a better sense of what I wanted to do with my data, the limitations of my initial “system” (or rather, lack of it) started to become apparent. One problem had to do with storing information in hierarchical folder structures, whether in the My Documents folders or in other two-pane outliners and personal information managers (PIM). The inherent limitation of most two- or three-pane viewers of data (such as Windows Explorer) is that in the (read more...)