Latest News from the Synote Blog – Congratulations Mike

Synote has won the Times Higher Education Outstanding ICT Initiative of the Year Award for The University of Southampton. The trophy was presented to Dr Mike Wald, Synote’s creator, during an evening ceremony hosted by Rob Brydon at the Grosvenor House Hotel, Park Lane, London.

Yunjia and Mike at the 6th ALUIAR Meeting

The 6th ALUIAR meeting provided us with the chance to showcase the final iteration of research version of Synote with the minutes as follows.

• Apologies were received from Lester Gilbert and Lisa Harris, Lisa Roberts and Mary Gobbi was also unable to attend.
• Outcome of Legal Discussions – we are awaiting some guidance from Diana Galpin as mentioned in a previous blog.
• Overview of the present web site – overall the new look was well received and individual interviews are now underway – see notes below.
• Foot-pedal experiments – these have been successful using the stop start foot pedal and software as mentioned in a previous blog.
• Dates for user testing – three interviews have already been undertaken and transcriptions need to be analysed using the ALUIAR version of Synote.
• AOB – see below
• Date for next meeting – it is hoped this will take place on 14/15 or 16th December.

Under any other business Debbie mentioned some other options for coding conversations and data analysis such as AtlasTI.  Lisa Roberts provided us with a very useful link to reviews of all the desktop research tools that could be used for analysing conversations and some multimedia.  CAQDAS is a networking project which also offers training events on research software.

At this point it was felt important to perhaps look at the unique selling points of this version of Synote!   We collected several including the fact that it is possible to:

• use if for free
• work quickly and easily on any desktop with access to the internet
• have web based data and multimedia for sharing research.
• use the data presented for evaluation, appraisal and supervision
• capture simultaneous conversations with similar timeframes
• colour code annotations
• tag themes and categories
• use titles of annotations for sorting.
• use a foot pedal to control the media player and other aspects of the interface
• use keyboard only input and screen reader access (Equality Act 2010)
• use speech recognition for re-speaking

There then followed a debate about a name for this version of Synote that will be released on Source Forge as a download for organisations or it could also be on a university server so that downloads can be monitored.

Possible logos

Should the name be:

• Synote Lite
• Synote Research
• Synote Scholar
• SynoteXtra
• Synote Extra

Please let us know what you think – voting is taking place!

So far three interviews have been carried out with researchers and the data will be made available on Synote with annotations – the majority of the comments coming out have been very positive including those from our external evaluator.  However, work still needs to be undertaken on certain icons, tooltips and compatibility with all browsers.

Final usability scores will be collected on the iSurvey version of the SUS evaluation form open to all the team.  Further interviews are planned in the coming weeks with final tweaks to the look and feel of this iteration taking place early in December when the last meeting will be held.