SoSciSo: Social Science Software - Software in Social Science Research

Today, when I came back to my seat in the library my neighbour was not at her place and I could take a look on her laptop display (I have to admit, that it really was an accidental gaze and I wouldn’t like to be pigeonholed together with Zuckerberg, Apple & Co.). I could read Folker and transcription. Didn’t knew that. I fired up~~Google~~DuckDuckGo and got to the site of the Archiv für gesprochenes Deutsch (Archive for spoken German) in Mannheim. Folker was developed in line with the GAT2 conventions (GAT2: Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem/conversation analysis transcription system). It was written by an ‘old fellow’, developer of EXMARaLDA, Thomas Schmidt.

The program is freely available, you only have to registrate. It looks tidy, not oversized and suitable for transcription purposes. Eventually we will have more news on Folker at this lieu.

As is well-known, Die Zeit (The Time – Newspaper) accompanies the decent student throughout his studies from the enrolment, through their suburban homes, during the purchase of the first till the third car, during child optimisation and sometimes even while gardening – the whole time. A small article is now dedicated to software in the studies. We would like to comment briefly on it.

Actually, it will be brief since there is not much content in the article of Die Zeit. The programs Paper Toss, Foldit, Challenging Alarm Clock and Stay Focused rather distract from studying in our opinion. Everybody should have a program like Evernote or Zotero on the computer if you are spending a lot of time in front of the PC. TinEye and PlagiatCheck can be definitely considered as small tools. But are they really software for the studies?!

With Docear the author should have dedicated more than the given 2 minutes of research: “…is what we call an “academic literature suite”. It integrates everything you need to search, organize and create academic literature in a single application: a digital library, reference manager, PDF and file manager, note taking and mind mapping.” (www.docear.org) Docear is Open Source, free and a ‘young’ and promising program. A short overview can be found here: Docear at SoSciSo.

It can be credited to Die Zeit that before publishing the article, SoSciSo unfortunately was not only yet and research was somehow complicated ;).