Category: Technology

So I read every Rebus novel out there…

As challenges go, setting myself the task of reading every John Rebus novel by Ian Rankin was hardly the worst one out there.  Some people set themselves challenges that require some kind of sacrifice or tough physical effort.  This involved sitting down and reading a series of books, sometimes on the sofa with a cup of tea to hand, but more often than not, whilst waiting for the Tiny Terror to lie down in his cot and go to sleep.

So what did I learn?  I already knew that Ian Rankin was one of my favourite authors, and John Rebus remains one of my favourite protagonists.  However, as I’d tended to dip into the series in and out since the late 1990s, depending on what books were available when I happened to be in a bookshop or library or hanging around at my parents’ house,  I’d not read the novels in sequence or at regular intervals.  I suspect that this is a fairly common way of reading series if you come to them once the series is in full swing and you are reliant on the vagaries of library and bookshop ordering.  Therefore, whilst I knew the characters, I’d not fully appreciated the development of character and plot over time.

Rebus is one of my favourite characters because he isn’t handsome, cool or thin; he is overweight, scruffy for most of the time, and drives an ancient Saab.   With the series running in ‘real time’, these qualities become more entrenched over the years.  Whilst there are intertextual nods to Life on Mars in Saints of the Shadow Bible, Rebus’ status as an older police officer who will not or cannot retire means that as he ages, he stands out more as the Gene Hunt of Edinburgh.  But if Gene Hunt is rooted in the 1970s and 1980s, Rebus is a time traveller.

Rebus grapples with the new technologies that emerge over time:  pecking out text messages with his fingers sticks in my mind from the later novels.  One of the things I have enjoyed the most about the work I have done on juvenile crime is the ways in which technological change impacts on the things that we value and the way that we behave.  I was fascinated by the attraction getting things for free from outdoor vending machines held for interwar teens, or their interest in jumping into the back of grocery delivery vans for goodies.  There’s much to unpick here about the history of consumption, transport etc and how it impacts not only on our ‘social’ behaviours (the convenience of shopping and the ability to afford chocolate, toys etc) but also on our ‘antisocial’ behaviours, in terms of acquiring these things if we don’t have the money to do so (or don’t want to spend it).  Rebus is more concerned with violent crimes, but the acquisitive society shapes much of this.  As the novels progress, and Scottish devolution and independence become ever more pressing ‘real life’ themes, so Rankin explores the ways in which this impacts on the opportunities for both the under- and overworlds to make a profit from the changing political world of Scotland.  And then there are the ways in which those who don’t have the resources fare in this world.  Rebus also notes the ways in which the internet and social media have changed some aspects of our behaviour – the younger generation of police and criminals go about their business through computers, tablets and phones.  Yet there remains a place for the shoe leather and contacts form of policing that Rebus is more at home with – though even he knows how to use Google…

Given that there’s still some time before Even Dogs in the Wild comes out, I may well start again with Knots and Crosses and 1990s Rebus.  These are novels that stand multiple reads largely because they are not just about crime.  They are about Edinburgh; they are about the state of modern Scotland, but also its place in the United Kingdom.  They are novels about how linked in we are with the world around us, virtually as much as in the ways in which people move or are moved through the criminal underground, either for nefarious ends or because they are desperate and it is the criminals who offer them the glimmer of hope for a better life.  Anyway: that’s enough fangirling from me.  If you’ve not read any Rebus, why not start soon?

 

 

 

 

Why historians should love NVivo

I admit it, I knew about NVivo for years but until I started in my current post and it was installed on my office computer, I’d not really thought about using it for primary source research.  I associated it with research that used interviews on a large scale, with NVivo as a tool for drawing links between a large number of interviews.

When I started on the social justice philanthropy project, which involves thirty extensive semi-structured interviews with charitable foundations, I realised that I was going to need to learn how to use NVivo sharpish!  At that point, we obviously didn’t have the transcripts to work with, so I decided to try it out with some of my more historical research.  I had two oral history interview transcripts that I ran through it, although this was more an exercise in learning the functions than seeing what NVivo could really do.

I have used NVivo in two projects that use different forms of historical and biographical documents: the first was a project to trace the connections between settlement residents at Toynbee Hall between 1884 and c.1939; the second was looking at mentions of juvenile delinquency in Hansard between 1940 and 1969.

In both cases, NVivo made short work of the management of the research process, and of ensuring a rigorous analysis.  With the analysis of the connections/backgrounds of the residents, I set up an internal file for each resident, which included the dates they had been resident, their date of birth and death, and whatever biographical information, in note form, that I could obtain on them.  I then coded the notes in order to start making connections.  The first photograph here is a screen grab of these internal files:

Screen grab of the internal files used in NVivo

You can organise your internal files (or indeed any files in any of the areas) in whatever way best suits you.  Then you can work through the files in the order that suits you as you ‘code’  them – simply highlighting the text and using NVivo to assign it to a node.  When you are done, you can look at the nodes, and see where your data falls…

Looking at your nodes

So, if I wanted to know then how many of the residents had studied at the University of Oxford, I could simply click through to that ‘tree’ node to see the ‘child’ nodes for the different colleges.  Sure, it took some time to do this, but it refamiliarised me with parts of my research that I’d not looked at for a while, and this method is far preferable to having a print out of an enormous word document adorned with sticky notes and highlighter pen… And it enabled me to visualise these networks in different ways:

Visualising connections with NVivo

Much as I have a fondness for the days of sitting sprawled on my office floor with a piece of flipchart paper working all these connections out in felt-tip pen, NVivo does this same job in a faster and more rigorous fashion.  Sure, you’ll get rubbish out if you put rubbish in with your coding, and you will need to spend time working on your coding.  There are many more complex things that you can do with NVivo, but if what you want to do is get a grip on a large range of qualitiative data, then this is the program for you.  I’ve used it for an analysis of networks and backgrounds, but also for coding up large amounts of parliamentary debates, but the potential for historians who use qualitative techniques is endless.

I prefer to learn programs by fiddling with them, but there are plenty of good books out there for learning the basics and beyond with NVivo. Graduate schools and doctoral training consortia often run sessions on programs like NVivo, whilst it is often included on qualitative research methods training on social science postgraduate degrees.  It sometimes crops up on undergraduate degrees, like the BSc in Social Sciences that I teach on at Kent. And of course, there are various one day training programmes out there that might be up your street.  QSR International, who make NVivo, are keen Twitterers, and are great at responding to queries on Twitter, as I discovered one day when I sent a disheartened tweet when I couldn’t get my work laptop to behave itself… It is a great program for qualitative research in history and other disciplines, and you should certainly check it out. QSR offer free trials… so there’s no reason not to at least see for yourself!