The Economic Crisis Though the Eyes of Transana

For the KWALON 2010 conference, several software representatives were given a common data set consisting of text and media files about the financial crisis of 2008 – 2009. This paper focuses on the process of analyzing the media files in this data set using Transana, a software package designed for the transcription and qualitative analysis of video and audio data. The authors describe several styles of transcription used in the process of making sense of the data, the selection and coding of analytically interesting segments of the media files, and working with coded data to develop a coherent narrative from this data. They also describe their collaborative process, as facilitated by the software, and how that affected the analysis of the data. Finally, the authors describe the results of their analysis in terms of the multi-layered narrative of the data, and discuss the limitations of that analysis. URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs110116