QRCA Views

Q U A L I TAT I V E R E S E A R C H C O N S U LTA N T S A S S O C I AT I O N 55 Three key factors are contributing to this explosive growth: • Social media is huge: 30 billion pieces of content shared monthly on Facebook, over a billion tweets per week on Twitter, more than 26 million hours of video uploaded to YouTube annually, over 60 million photos a day posted on Instagram, and much more. • Millions of businesses and their employees working online, producing ever-increasing digital content: emails, documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and more. • The Internet of Things: millions of sen- sors, smartphones, and other devices communicating continuously over the Internet. Current Tools and Gaps It is obvious we live in a world of so- called Big Data, something the consulting firm McKinsey & Company says "will become a key basis of competition." An often overlooked aspect of Big Data is sometimes called Big Content, a term that analyst firm Gartner uses to bring atten- tion to the unstructured content that is often lumped in with Big Data. When it comes to the unstructured world of information qualitative research- ers work with, two important types of tools have evolved as key parts of the Qualitative Research toolbox in the past decade or so: search engines and text anal- ysis tools. A search engine, by definition, is soft- ware that is used to search the web for information; we are all familiar with Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Google has become synonymous with search and, to a degree, represents the state of the art. For transactional searches such as, "Who is the CEO of IBM?" or "Address for Company ABC," you will more than likely receive the correct answer. However, ask Google an informational question like, "What is the best strategy for developing a business plan for auto sales?" and you'll trudge through page after page of blue links. This latter type of question is more similar to what QR professionals spend time explor- ing, and, in this case, the state of the art is neither efficient nor effective. Text analysis tools, on the other hand, highlight specific terms in the most sim- plistic way: coding open-ended responses. Many software packages will include word clouds or offer content analysis in the form of tables and charts to offer insights into the verbatim responses. Text analytics may tell you how many times the word "Strategy" came up, but not the insights around when and why. Zakta – the New Paradigm for Speed-Reading the Web Zakta, an online text analytics tool, offers a new way to cut through the clutter and get to the exact pieces of information we need for our research projects. Zakta's approach is to visually navigate the exploding universe of Big Data and Big Content. QR professionals can start with a quick search and instantly get a visual way to navigate the information. The initial search is like seeing a bird's eye view of the landscape and rapidly separating the forest from the trees to get the information you're looking for faster. Zakta is web- and social media-based, transforming pages of unstructured search results into organized visualizations (see Figure 1). Start with a search topic (such as "millennials language learning") and select a search source (Web, News, Social, etc.); Zakta can then scan those search sources and visually arrange that topic into subtopic(s) of interest (e.g., Language Learning Technology, Foreign Language Learning, Teaching, etc.). The relative size of the visualization represents the number of sites pertinent to the section – the larg- er the visualization, the more information on the topic. There are three different visual representations (see Figure 1) that can be used for any search. We all learn and process data differently; Zakta has made it easy to "look" at data the way you need to see it. It is also easy to go back to the search sources (Figure 2) to explore different avenues for the same informa- tion. By the time you read this, Zakta will have added a new feature to analyze spreadsheet data with a similar result. This feature will allow you to import a spread- sheet with open-ended responses and get a visual analysis of the text. This promises to be useful for analyzing Market Research Online Communities (MROC), bulletin board, online focus groups, or large one- on-one projects where transcripts can be downloaded into spreadsheet format. If you do survey work, it should also help with open-ended analysis. Key Benefits for Qualitative Researchers Zakta is not appropriate for all types of searches. Sometimes you only want to know where the nearest Thai restaurant is located. However, for the projects where you want a simple way to search multiple outlets simultaneously, Zakta offers many features to make that job easier. Research visually. Create research projects, curate relevant information and collaborate with ease. Gain insights faster. Figure 1

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