Humanities Data: Image Analysis with NVivo

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Kathryn Desplanque studies a corpus of 500 satirical images and about 70 items of popular writing (short fiction, panoramic literature, and popular theater). To make sense of this collection of images and the writings that interact with them, she uses Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) software called nVivo. QDA software is traditionally used by qualitative sociologists to make sense of interviews and other documentation. Kathryn has adapted this software for humanistic study, using it as an augmented gallery management system or flexible relational database that permits her to "tag" her images, correlate them to their bibliographic metadata, and run queries to carve through this set of images via their iconography, medium, date of production, and so on. In this session, Kathryn will walk through her use of nVivo for humanistic study and demonstrate the way in which this fits into every level of her research and writing, from tracking down images in overseas libraries, to annotating and analyzing them, and integrating them into her academic writing.

An event supported by the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge, Duke Digital Humanities Initiative, and the Wired! Lab for digital art history & visual studies.