Previously we've taken a little look at how you can find & gather conversations about a brand, person or topic online. But once you have all this wonderful data how are you going to analyse it? Automated analysis of content may not be accurate and often it has a pre-defined structure, for example positive or negative sentiment. This is often too inflexible when you a particular hypothesis you want to test. The simple solution is to analyse the content yourself. The down side to this is that it can a looooong time to analyse (when I was taught content analysis all I can remember is coding 10 second chunks of a video for what seemed like forever, it gives me nightmares). If you're stuck using something like Excel for this it can be pretty confusing/tedious to use. (There is some great specialist software out there for this type of stuff but unless you do a lot of content analysis it's probably not worth forking out the cash). To help make thing easier I've started to put together a prototype/proof of concept tool for help analyse content. There are a couple of things I wanted to achieve:

• Make it a quick as possible to code up the data,
• Make it easy to focus on the particular content you want to analyse.
• Build it online so it's more accessible, increases the collaborative opportunities (which should help with getting other coders to analyse the data so we can check inter-rater reliability)

At the moment the tool allows you to:

• Use your keyboard to code the data (up, down arrows, hot keys to code). This is a lot quicker than clicking or dragging and dropping.
• It only shows you one piece of content at a time, so it's easier to focus on.
• Color codes the content so it's easy to see what's coded and what isn't.
• Does simple reporting and exporting of the coded data.

It is only a prototype so there are some limitations:

• It only allows the input of a single set of codes, rather than a full on code book.
• It doesn't recognise different users yet so it can't calculate inter-rater reliability.
• It only imports/exports CSV data, not XML or JSON etc.

Demo

To use the tool you use the 'up' and 'down' arrow keys to move between data and hot keys, which are in brackets () next to the codes to code up the data. The hot keys start q, w, e, a, s.

• Demo - Have a play with the tool here.
• You can upload your own data here.
• A list of all the content analysis going on, on the site lives here.

If there's any interest, let me know and I'll look at developing this further. Any queries or questions, give me a shout.