Hugh Carling
Co-founder of Liveminds. I love to bring like-minded people together. Whether that's growing businesses, running online communities, staging events or captaining my village cricket team, nothing makes me happier than seeing people with a shared passion, coming together and making the most of it.
What a fascinating window we now have on our participant’s worlds. They can simply reach for the phone in their pocket and at the touch of a button, instantly start sharing their thoughts, feelings and experiences with us.
All this rich, real life content is incredibly powerful for researchers but it also means a lot of time spent viewing and organising, sorting the great from the ‘not so great’.
When participants are capturing and sharing lots of video in diary studies or auto ethnography it’s especially important to be able to organise their content neatly and efficiently.
Generally these images and videos are best seen in context, so that researchers have full clarity on who created them, when they did them and why. In Liveminds you can quickly and easily save all of these images and videos as you moderate, in either a simple standardised format or exactly as they were shared. This approach is mirrored perfectly in the Word or Excel exports of your transcripts.
Participant Media in Context
However, it can also be useful to get an overview of all this media content. So, we’re very happy to introduce the Participants Media gallery, which now enables you to do just that. One click from the ‘Manage Project’ menu takes you there and enables you to see ‘at a glance’ thumbnails of every piece of media in your project. Each one is marked with the title, the participant’s name, and the time it was created.
You can then filter this view down by type, choosing between ‘image’, ‘video’ or ‘other files’. Alternatively, or additionally, you can use the Spotlight to filter by group or participant too.
Participant Media Gallery
In this view, you’ll see all the media you looked at whilst moderating and can click to download any one that you might want to use in your report. There’s no need to spend your time and money re-downloading the ones that are perhaps best left on the ‘cutting room floor.’ If you do want to do just one big dump of all the media, good or bad, you can use a simple browser add on like Downthemall. We think the Participant Media galleries provide a smarter way to work though and we hope you do too.
As always, please let us know your thoughts and feedback so we can keep making your online qualitative research even easier and more colourful with Liveminds.
