Your copyright librarian here. While I find all aspects of copyright fascinating, of particular interest to me is how authors, writers, composers, etc., feel about copyright and the idea of intellectual property. I’ve been gathering massive amounts of information on this topic for some time and have recently been stymied by a research problem: how to organize and visualize data collected while researching the author point of view on changes to copyright law. I considered:
- What did I expect organizing my information to show me?
- What type of information did I have and how would that affect how I could organize it?
- Was my data complete or did it have any predictable failings? And how would those failings affect the organization and visualization of the data?
- What were the restrictions I would face on identifying a resource?
Firstly, I hoped that organizing and visualizing my information would help me see patterns and draw connections. Most of the information I had been gathering were quotes and textual snippets along with their original citations and category tags. Each snippet was inextricably tied to its time period, so I knew that I had to find a way to group and track the information in context. While I could put all these items in a spreadsheet and create graphs that visualized the tags as they occurred over time, my data was less reliably quantitative than it was qualitative. I couldn’t be sure that I had managed to capture all the discussion or data, so comparing activity in number form wouldn’t be reliable. This is why Microsoft Excel, Time Flow and Microsoft Power BI didn’t really work for me.
I restricted myself to programs to which I already had access or that were available for free. I ended up investing my time in Tiki Toki, which has been discussed in a previous Digital Dialog. Tiki Toki allowed me to show the frequency of my snippets, to place them on a timeline, and to include enough of the text for me to ‘see’ a conversation happening. I created the timeline: Author Voices in Copyright.
The next time you are looking at a tool to help you organize or visualize your research, consider letting your research lead you.