Thanks for all the tips, everyone! I'll definitely look into the things mentioned. Jennifer Stromer, your tool sounds like it might be suited for my data -- Herring's work has been useful to my own -- so I will be in touch. Regarding Atlas.TI, it is also what I've been using to code my data, in part because their student price for the software is $100, which is lovely of them (and probably a good marketing strategy-- "the first one is [almost] free!"). I like Atlas ok as qualitative coding software. I couldn't figure out its autocoding feature, which would have been useful for coding blog comments as they have a standard shape. Though Atlas's boolean and grep searching techniques are counterintuitive and involve a steep learning curve, those have proved pretty useful. I am generally exporting data from Atlas.TI into ManyEyes ( http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/ ) for my visualizations at the moment. Visualization-wise, Atlas.TI promises but does not deliver. As far as I can tell, the only visualizations you can do with it at the moment are network visualizations of the categories/codes you've developed yourself! The software does not seem to provide any tools for visualizing data. It's pretty puzzling why they've made it that way. I'm hoping they'll incorporate some real data visualization tools in the future. cheers, Gus Andrews
BTW, Tracy suggested Atlas.ti. I've mucked around quite a bit with Atlas' visualization tool. It's clunky, and in the end abandoned my efforts to use that to track interactions. I think it's useful if you're hoping to visualize small segments of interaction. But, my data sets tend to be relatively large, making the Atlas approach quite labor intensive.