NVivo Experimentation

Since the last NVivo update, I believe I've gotten video coding figured out. I finished coding the OUYA promotional video that I was working on, and I've started working on a few unboxing videos. What I'm finding interesting is that when working with both texts that come from an official source and texts that come from an audience, there are certain phrases that belong exclusively to each domain. Only the audience is concerned with pirates; only the officials at OUYA are concerned with fundraising. I'm also observing instances where phrases are used in the official OUYA texts and are later replicated by the audience.

Seeing the movement of language from one population to another makes me think that a useful feature for NVivo to implement would be a visual timeline. This way, you could see how certain coded features get picked up and rise or drop in popularity of usage. In a previous project, I'd worked with internet memes which get picked up and combined with other memes as they gain popularity. I would have loved some way to visualize the different types of memes and their frequency of usage over time. It would really help in longitudinal rhetorical projects.

I also have to admit that I'd pulled up NVivo earlier in the week just to have fun-- a friend of mine was talking about the backlash against Sony that happened after they revealed that they were not implementing some of the media features on the PS4 that users had become accustomed to on the PS3. I captured the comments on the press release and ran them through NVivo, having it display the most frequently used words. Just by itself, the analysis was interesting because you could spot the most controversial features easily and the anger of the fans was easily spotted as well.

This project, too, led me to a problem-- the comments I captured were on a press release, and every time I switched to a new page of comments, the press release remained at the top of the page. This means that, even though I captured 12 pages of comments, I also captured the text of the press release 12 times. Short of manually editing that text out, I don't know how I could selectively capture only some text on a website OR delete that text within NVivo. This meant that any kind of automatic analysis would count the wording in the press release twice as opposed to each individual comment once. I'm still not entirely sure what to do with this.