World Bank opens access to WDI

The World Bank has opened access to a flagship dataset that was mostly closed. Until recently, only a fraction of the thousand-plus data series that comprise the World Development Indicators (WDI) were available to non-paying customers in advanced economies. As of April 10, 2010, the World Bank has opened access to the complete dataset.

Coding Qualitative Data

A friend of mine recently pointed me towards MAXQDA for coding and parsing qualitative research. Too bad I just wrote a post on how garden-variety relational databases could be hornswoggled for the task. I was so proud of my handwritten beta, too….

A couple of quick web searches turned up NVivo and XSight, by QSR, QDA Miner by Provalis, and Atlas.ti. TAMS for Mac OSX may be the most honestly titleds: text analysis markup system.

And sure enough someone has been on the free and open source (FOSS) track. Weft QDA. Dexter. Transana.

• UPDATE: The CDC (United States) publishes AnSWR at zero cost.

And a review site or two for multi-methods CAQDAS research tools. Clearly I have some reading to do.

• UPDATE: There are a multitude of review sites, often hosted at university social science departments (e.g., sociology, ethnography, psychology), too many to list here and I’m not sure how to categorize them.

Please comment if you have worked with these packages and can recommend a way of organizing them by functionality and quality. There does not seem to be a single standard for what the packages ought to do, and how to do it well.

Tracking research interactions

How much information should the researcher keep about each site? Each interview? The answer, of course, is “all of it.” This can be an enormously time-consuming task, depending on the richness of the information the interviewer needs to collect about the site, the subject, and the interview instrument to be used.

Relational databases are purpose built for this sort of task. In a relational database, the user enters all the relevant information about each entity once, and only once. Whenever it is needed in the future, the database query looks up all the relevant bits of information from as many places as necessary for the task at hand. Many vendors are out there (Access, Filemaker, SAS, Oracle), but some of them are free and open source (MySQL, SugarCRM) and do not require years of study to become competent (OpenOffice).

To reiterate, you don’t need any money, and you don’t need a computer science degree to track your interviews in a relational database, but you can save yourself a ton of time.

Where to Share Your Data?

There are many competing standards out there for how to publish datasets with due credit to the author and publisher. Rich, structured metadata and interoperable standards for data identification are rapidly developing, but it’s not clear which standard is going to win the day or which search engines will successfully organize all that data.

Here is my short wish list for data standards:

• datasets should be openly available for peer-reviewed scientific publications
• datasets should be openly available for publicly funded scientific research
• dataset publishing standards should include units of measure for quantitative datasets
• dataset publishing standards should contain descriptions of categorical variables contained
• dataset publishing standards should contain full bibliographic information

Once structured information about datasets is available in an open format, aggregators will step into the breach and serve that information to researchers, along with well maintained links to the data publishers’ sites. The main barrier to aggregating and indexing information about datasets is common standards, not a dearth of universities and companies willing to do the job.

Iraqi Virtual Science Library needs a marketing director

The Iraqi Virtual Science Library boasts an impressive list of partners and resources. American universities created IVSL in response to Iraq’s forcible isolation from the world of research and scholarship under Saddam.

Scholars here are thirsty for new knowledge. They know they need access to journals and current datasets to practice modern science. The trouble is, they don’t know what resources they have available.

Both the faculty and the students here, independently, have asked me to use my credit card to help them pay for World Bank datasets. [For clarity: their money, using my credit card as a payment system.] They know what journals and data they are looking for, and they want to get into the game.