Work in a workspace

Typically, researchers perform a variety of tasks in the Media Suite, such as formulating queries for searching collections, creating their own ‘virtual collections’, and making annotations. The Media Suite offers a “virtual Workspace” to allow researchers to save their work. The workspace thus provides researchers with possibilities to manage their research process and enable transparancy of the process.

The Workspace supports the following functions:

  • Organising work in User Projects

  • Adding personal collections to the Workspace to apply Media Suite functions such as search and annotation

  • Programming with data using Jupyter Notebooks (only limitedly available

In the Figure below, an overview of these functions is presented:

User Projects

In the Media Suite, a User project is defined as a container for storing personal corpora and annotations created during search and analysis of the data available in the Media Suite. Some of the Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) typically used by researchers, refer to user projects as “hermeneutic units” (in Atlas.ti) or “Projects” (in NVIVO).

In the Media Suite, for instance, a researcher can create a user project for a topic or for a research question, which will help her/him, among others, to:

  • Group together entire items or fragments for creating a corpus (the so-called “bookmarks”),
  • Add and retrieve manual annotations
  • Store and compare saved queries
  • Keep track of her/his browsing history (the so-called “navigation paths” in the Exploratory tool)
  • Take screenshots of “tool sessions” (in Version 4 only available in the Exploratory tool).

In the User Project page in the Workspace you see the list of your personal user projects (empty for first time users). You can:

  • Create a new user project .
  • View the list of projects with their name, description, number of bookmarks (items in your corpus), project owner, privacy level (in version 3 all projects are “private” by default), your access rights (in version 3 the user is “administrator” for all projects created by her/him), and the creation date.
  • Open a user project, delete it, or export it.