WORKING WITH RESEARCH JOURNALS

Research Journals are Documents in Transana where you can record your thoughts about your analytic process and insights about your data. You can also use them to start your analytic writing.

Transana’s Document Window has many of the features one would expect of a basic word processor. You can edit text and format it in a variety of ways. The primary feature that adds real power to Research Journals is Transana’s capacity to add hyperlinks in your Documents and Transcripts directly to your Quotes, Clips, Snapshots, and Notes.

Edit a Research Journal and Add Some Hyperlinks

If you created a Research Journal earlier in the Tutorial, please load that document. If you did not, please create a Research Journal Library and then add a blank Document called “Research Journal”.

Put the Research Journal in Edit mode and write something in the Research Journal that implies you want to refer to a Quote.  Right-click one of the Quotes in one of your Collections and choose Insert Quote Hyperlink in the menu. Transana will insert a hyperlink called (Quote link) at the Document’s cursor position.

You can edit text of the hyperlink, but you can’t click on the hyperlink to place your cursor in the text because that triggers the hyperlink. Instead, you have to sneak up on it sideways. To edit the text of a hyperlink, click next to the link and use the right or left cursor keys to move your cursor into the hyperlink text for editing.

Now write something in your Research Journal about one of your Clips. Right-click a Clip in the data window and choose Insert Clip Hyperlink from the menu.

Add some text about creating a link to a Snapshot. As described earlier in the Tutorial, if you Insert a Snapshot into your Research Journal, you will get both a copy of the coded image and a hyperlink to the live Snapshot. If you want a link to a Snapshot without including the Snapshot itself, just right-click the Snapshot in the data window and select Insert Snapshot Hyperlink from the menu.

Last, but certainly not least, write something about creating a link to a Note. Now right-click a Note in the Database tree and choose Add Note Hyperlink.

Now click on each of your hyperlinks. The data item used to trigger the creation of the hyperlink is loaded in each instance.

About Research Journals

It’s important to recognize that a Research Journal is just a Document in Transana that you choose to use in a particular analytic way. That has several important implications.

• You can add hyperlinks to ANY Document or Transcript in Transana where you think it would be analytically useful to create a link to a data object.
• You can create Quotes from a Research Journal and code them.
• These hyperlinks will only be available within Transana. When you export your Document from Transana, the hyperlink will not function in the exported document.
• Hyperlinks are one-way links. The text with a hyperlink knows which data item it connects to. The data item, however, knows nothing about the hyperlink. So hyperlinks are not substitutes for Collections or Keywords. They are primarily intended to be a writing tool.
• If you delete a data item to which you have created a hyperlink, the hyperlink will not be removed from the Document or Transcript. It won’t function because there’s no longer anything linked to it, but it will remain in place despite the data item deletion.