Working with NVivo10

I decided to start working on a project for another class-- Rhetorical Theory-- with NVivo 10 to organize my sources. For this project, I'm looking at the rhetoric surrounding the OUYA gaming platform, including the rhetoric of creators, users, and the console itself (understood as user script).

I began by installing the NCapture extension to my browser and capturing the OUYA Kickstarter page as a .pdf. I was able to open this in NVivo, and I coded it for several different recurring themes-- revolutionary language (anything that described shifting power balances), money/economic language, the ideas of hacking (changing the system against the creator's specifications) and experimentation (changing the system in accordance with the creator's specifications), and the system's relationship to other gaming and technology companies. Coding this wasn't difficult once I found the options to highlight and create colored ribbons. I think I need the visual feedback so that I know my codes are being logged and counted.

One of the first problems I encountered was with the video embedded in the Kickstarter page. Kickstarter uses a video player that is not recognized by NCapture or my installed video capture extension. I was able to find the same video on YouTube, and before I realized that NCapture could take YouTube videos, I downloaded it and converted it to AVI myself. I imported the video, but I am having trouble coding it. The pause/play/rewind features are also a bit clunky, especially when you want to capture things that only last a few seconds. I'm definitely more used to the keyboard controls found in Final Cut software, Quicktime, and other applications.

For the time being, I put the video coding on hold when I figured out that I could capture all of the comments on the YouTube video I downloaded. I like that NCapture stores these like a database and natively supports the thread structure (reply format). Strangely, NVivo is showing me a different number of comments available than YouTube does, but there might be discrepancies because the comments on YouTube are split into two different pages. Whenever I try to capture these pages separately, I get the same data when I import it into NVivo. I'm not sure what's happening there, but since I'm getting about 690/730 comments, I'm not hugely concerned about the missing 40. I'll still be playing with this in hopes of figuring out just what's happening.

So far, I have coded about 200 of the available comments. I had been coding words, phrases, and fragments of sentences, but I suspect that the better way is to code comments as a whole. That gives a far more unified unit of analysis. If I did that, I would then just add a code for "unrelated," which would get used pretty often in this particular thread of comments. It is, however, already noticeable that the focus of the YouTube commenters is vastly different than the focus of the video or the OUYA Kickstarter page.

From here, I intend  to work harder on figuring out video coding. I would like to eventually record some captures from the OUYA itself (I own one), which I can code as user scripts (in other words, what the device encourages users to do and what is discourages). That work would almost have to be done as video. I can also foresee coding images, because the packaging of the system includes some interesting language use as well.

My project file can be downloaded here.