One of the things that make blogs particularly interesting are series. The “series” series recommends series at related blogs. 

Logo of the AoM Interest Group Strategizing, Activities & Practices

Logo of the AoM Interest Group Strategizing, Activities & Practices

For some time now, the digital revolution has reached and changed everyday research practices. There is hardly any part of the research process for which no digital tool is available, starting from creating a mind map of your first idea (e.g. “Freemind”) over collecting (e.g. “Sitesucker”) and coding your data (e.g. “WebQDA”) to collaboratively annotating and writing (e.g. “eLaborate”). And while many of these digital tools require substantial financial investments, a growing number of tools is available open access and free of charge.

Over at the strategizingblog, I have therefore recently launched a series on “Open Tools” sharing experiences with some of these openly accessible digital tools, which preferably should also be based on open source software. The first entry of the series, for instance, featured the online transcription tool “oTranscribe”. Aside from being free of charge and open-source-based, the web application just requires a browser and is therefore available across platforms, which also makes it an ideal tool for teaching purposes.

To get an overview about different available tools, I recommend having a look at the Digital Research Tools (DiRT) directory, which lists a high number of tools for a great variety of use cases and has been introduced in post #3 of the Series.