The end (of the Survey) and a begining (of the paper)

The survey was concluded a few months ago, I've extracted and analysed the results, written a draft paper on the results; I'm finally ready to publish my results.

Analysis was interesting, most Q-Sort papers use various analytical tools out there. But as they're quite old my supervisor said something quite amusing, 'PhD Computer science, using Fortran, Pascal etc. based tools, no!'

So off I went and learnt some more Python, science kit etc. and wrote some code to perform principal components analysis and  functional analysis. I asked a friend, who has a Computer Science PhD and an A-level A in maths about functional analysis, and his reply was "an analysis of your functions?", at which point I returned to reading more books on the topic.

The survey page was taken offline by the hoster as their spam blocking blocks any mention of "'ac.uk" on any pages hosted by them. I told them they've cut off a good junk of the British academic community, to no avail.

The Q-Sort Survey for Attitudes to Data Sharing within the Archaeological Community, is here.

As promised, the Q-Sort survey for attitudes to data sharing within the archaeological community, is now ready and on-line.

I've written a handy user guide, it's well worth a quick look, as it's unlikely to take more than three minutes to read.


This link will take you to the survey.

Why am I doing this, who am I etc?

I’m a 2nd year Computer Science PhD. student at the University of Manchester  researching attitudes to data sharing within the archaeological community with a view to developing tools for integrating and sharing archaeological data. To this end, having conducted semi-structured interviews, I have developed an on-line survey to identify issues that are acting as barriers to data sharing within the archaeological community.

It is in effect a form of requirements analysis, but with a focus on non-functional requirements, such as governance, ownership of data etc. as opposed to functional requirements, i.e. formats for capturing data, scope of a proposed system etc. Hence I have adopted  Q-Methodology for the survey, which is a ‘subjective’ or qualitative survey technique the results of are then examined quantitatively, by means of statistical analysis.

I'm only asking for your e-mail address in the survey, in addition to recording how the tiles are placed by you.

Here's a reminder what the Q-Sort survey looks like:-

Amongst other things, I'm doing a PhD....

The time, late 2011. The place, The University of Manchester. I begin a PhD in Computer Science. I am an extra mature student, having spent a few decades in industry as a software engineer and running my own little companies, more about that on my Linkedin profile.

So without further ado, what is my PhD about? It's about establishing an information systems framework for the field of Archaeology, 'Arhaeoinfomatics' .

To this end I have carried out some research, the results of which I will hopefully be posting retrospectively from my notes, material already present on-line, and last but no least my memory.