Newsgroups: bit.listserv.qualrs-l
Date:         Fri, 24 Jul 1992 12:37:37 -0400
Reply-To:     aa248@yfn.ysu.edu
              <QUALRS-L@UGA.BITNET>
From:         Nicholas Sturm <aa248@YFN.YSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Computers & Qualitative Research

>
>>From: MHORNEY%OREGON.BITNET@VM.USC.EDU
>>Date:         Tue, 21 Jul 1992 14:12:00 PDT
>>Subject:      Computers & Qualitative Research
>>
>>Please do not make the mistake in believing, as unfortunately many if not
>>most people do, that computers are intrinsically concerned with, or even
>>really based upon numbers.
>
>Computers are electronic devices that respond to two states: on and
>off.  This is where the binary arithmetic of 1s and 0s comes from.
>You can translate those 1s and 0s into 16-bit arrays and derive a
>hexidecmial coding scheme that allows you to differentiate between
>the various keys on a typewriter keyboard, and you can extend that
>addressing scheme so that you get function and control and
>alternative keys, but, at the center, computers are simply machines
>for crunching numbers - however they may be coded to match the
>alphabet.
>

I believe you were confused by your source of instruction about computers
(math or computer teacher, or books, etc.).  Initially computers had more
functions for logical comparison that for any mathematical activity--even
the simple operations of add and subtract were applications of AND, OR,
XOR, NOR and perhaps NOT.  Even the modern machine language set of operations
are more concerned with logical comparisons than with arithmatic (and few
can do much with higher math without conspicuously falling back on these
logical operations).  Make that, "the PC on your desk is a logic machine."

What you make of the logical comparisons is up to you.  Truth or Falsity,
meaning or gibberish?

>> ... Had A, B, and word processing
>>been the initial applications, we might have a radically different
>>cultural notion of what computing is about. History is contingent.
>
>But that would not have changed the physics of electronics, or what
>computers are capable of doing.
>

But does the physics and electronics have more to do with math or
philosophy?

>>I conceive of a computer as a machine for conjering, storing and
>>manipulating symbols. What the symbols mean is entirely in the eye
>>of the beholder.
>
>Precisely. But, as Joeseph Weizenbaum so cogently notes in his book:
>*Computer Power and Human Reason*, those symbols still have to be
>capable of being encoded, which, to a certain extent, predetermines
>what kinds of questions one can ask of and get answered by computer
>databases.
>

But the meaning of the code need be nothing more nor LESS than that
implied by any qualitative mental manipulation of the data.

>>In qualitative research projects I have found computers very
>>useful in a variety of ways, but especially in organizatizing coding
>>categories. Instead of marking up and then cutting up my transcripts
>>and notes, I manipulating them electronically.
>
>This may be the crux of our disagreement.  I don't understand coding
>or the results of compiling coded data as an exercises in qualitative
>research or methods.  Content analysis is a quantitative method as
>far as I'm concerned.

Quite possibly we have different concepts of coding--does it need to be
counting?  Are not trees or linkage maps of a different structural basis?

>
>Computers are very good at searching and matching things.  I can find
>out how many times the people I interview talked about vax135 or who
>paid the phone bills for usenet.  But there is no way I've been able
>to find to get the computer to tell me whose memory is more correct
>when it comes to disagreements in the history of the net.
>

Has some one sold you on the idea that computers can decided when your
original data is correct (valid, etc., even if quantitative--consider the
question of precision or of the computers difficulty with rounding of binary
practions)?  I don't even know many humans that can accomlish this.

--
  * aa248@yfn.ysu.edu *
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