Need to post more

I really do. I'm sorry I haven't posted, i just keep forgetting. It's what happened with any diary I ever kept. I'd be so keen, and then I'd let it slide. It's certainly no way to keep people informed and interested...

SO, work has slightly shifted focus these past days. I find writing a struggle so...at long last...it is time to start playing with data. I'm hoping writing can continue in the background. I really need to get better at multitasking, but I'm no good at it...i need to focus on just one bit of work at a time, and find it hard to do anything else. Maybe i can have like, wednesday and friday as writing days, and the rest for data. or something. whatever

so yeah, data. At first i am going to perform a quick analysis of my demographic data, find out where my subjects are from, age ranges, etc. Then I'll move onto the actual text data. First stage though, is to decide who's in, and who's out.

It seems harsh, because all my subjects were kind enough to fill in my questionnaire, and send me data, but some of them simply cannot be included. It has nothing to do with quantity or data, or my perception of quality...it's more about the nature of the data. I asked for journals, but some blogs aren't journals. Some blogs i have are more like discussion, commenting blogs, and do not reflect the authors day to day life. They are personal writing, yes, but they are not the diary style i am looking for, and i think at this early stage in blog analysis, i should stick with the one genre of blog that i have defined.

so far, thankfully, i have mostly yes, with some maybe and one or two no.

Once i've downloaded all the data from my email to my filespace, i can compile the data, and stick it in a spreadsheet for analysis. There are various ways i could do this, but my preferred method is using Perl. Perl, for those who don't know, is a scripting language, it's really good for text manipulation, and it's very compatible with Unix. Actually, come to think of it, i've written plenty of cool Perl scripts on my old Unix box, this will be my first on Linux...I hope the version of Perl is the same or I'll be well cheesed.

At the moment, I'm thinking I'll put some of my stats here, but I'll also prepare a webpage, and email it to all those people who requested to be kept in formed. But we'll see... :D
- posted by scott @ 1:43 pm