Qualitative research

I'm taking a class on qualitative research methods this semester and so, naturally, all of a sudden I see aspects of qualitative research everywhere (same thing happened to me a year and a half ago during a class on communications theory). For instance, I've been listening to a murder mystery book on CD lately on the way to and from work and have been struck by the protagonist's interviewing skills as well as the author's talent at description. Yesterday afternoon I started playing around with a demo version of a qualitative data analysis software package that lets you select portions of text to which you can add memos and tags and then you can look at the network of memos and tags and make connections among them. So this morning it struck me, as I was adding a couple of web sites that colleagues had brought to my attention to my del.isio.us pagee and adding tags and comments to them how similar del.isio.us is to this qualitative data analysis software.

Tonight in class I think (hope, it's on the syllabus) we're going to talk about qualitative data analysis software so I'm going to bring this up and see if anyone else thinks it's as cool as I do.