Welcome to the new QualQuant

Today, we’re happy to launch the new version of our website. The old version served us well for almost eight years—a really long time in web years. The Internet has changed a lot since 2002, and the re-designed site takes advantage of some of those changes.

The site is built on the WordPress platform. Although designed originally for blogs, WordPress is used more and more often to publish other types of sites, too. Here are some of the key benefits of moving our site to this platform:

• It will be easier to add dynamic content—like this post—using the site’s blog features. For now, we intend to use these features mainly to make announcements related to the NSF-funded courses we support in the Methods Mall; we aren’t ready to join the ranks of great anthropological blogs like Savage Minds or Neuroanthropology just yet. But we do have a few special posts planned for the near future — including Russ Bernard’s thoughts about the mixed methods movement and how it relates to what we do at QualQuant.
• You can now interact with the site. One way is to leave a comment on posts like this one to start a conversation with us or other readers of the site.
• You can stay up-to-date by subscribing to the RSS feed for blog posts or comments. This is a great way to be notified when there’s something new on the site without having to check back on your own. If you’re new to RSS, you can read more about it in plain English.
• You can easily share links to content on the site through email or social networking and bookmarking services like Facebook or Delicious. Just look for the buttons at the bottom of every page.
• The new site makes it easier to incorporate other media to support training in research methods. One example is the video tutorial series I’ve started about using MAXQDA software to manage and analyze qualitative data. We plan to add other online tutorial series in the near future.

We look forward to expanding the site in other ways, too. We plan to offer more resources for teaching and learning methods, including data sets, exercises, and bibliographies. We are also interested in collecting and sharing syllabi from courses in research methods—qualitative and quantitative alike. We want to create opportunities for people to interact on the site and are exploring the possibility of adding social networking features. For starters, participants in any of the NSF-sponsored training opportunities featured in the Methods Mall should register for an account to access course materials.

Beyond what the new site can do, the biggest change is the way it looks. It’s nice, isn’t it? Thanks to Kevin and David at rocketgenius for their excellent work—and for being a pleasure to work with. We are also grateful to the Cultural Anthropology Program at the National Science Foundation for support of the training opportunities we host here. And thanks to Alan Schultz for help in setting up the course pages.

If you’d like to comment on the site—or how we can make it better—please use the form below. We look forward to hearing from you!