Audiovisual Media Annotation Using Qualitative Data Analysis Software: A Comparative Analysis

The variety of specialized tools designed to facilitate analysis of audio-visual (AV) media are useful not only to media scholars and oral historians but to other researchers as well. Both Qualitative Data Analysis Software (QDAS) packages and dedicated systems created for specific disciplines, such as linguistics, can be used for this purpose. Software proliferation challenges researchers to make informed choices about which package will be most useful for their project. This paper aims to present an information science perspective of the scholarly use of tools in qualitative research of audio-visual sources. It provides a baseline of affordances based on functionalities with the goal of making the types of research tasks that they support more explicit (e.g., transcribing, segmenting, coding, linking, and commenting on data). We look closely at how these functionalities relate to each other, and at how system design influences research tasks.