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Ideaspace gives you a format for the same kind of inductive analysis your brain uses to make sense of the world around you.
Ideaspace gives a natural shape to the research process:
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Take notes on sources to build source profiles.
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Express for each source its key ideas;
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Group the ideas to discover themes.
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Group the themes under categories.
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When you follow this inductive sequence, an idea pyramid naturally emerges. As you assimilate new material, the idea pyramid evolves. Fully developed, the idea pyramid has a broad base of source data, rich in internet linkages, with progressively distilled concepts in the upper levels of the pyramid. The pyramid becomes an outline of your topic built from the bottom up. A well-constructed idea pyramid transforms sprawling data into ordered information.
In the source profile screen you can take notes in either open field or note card format. The screen also has fields for bibliographic data and for the ideas you extract from the source material. The source profiles form the base of the idea pyramid.
When you are ready to build the upper layers of the idea pyramid, a graphic-sorting screen lets you drag and drop ideas into thematic groups and articulate a theme for each group. At the theme level, another graphic-sorting screen lets you repeat this inductive sequence to group themes and articulate a category for each group. This process of discovering and describing commonalities is at the heart of the Ideaspace program.
At both the theme and category level, another screen has a percent of support feature that graphically displays the proportion of your sources that support or oppose a particular theme or category. At a glance you can monitor emerging consensus or controversy.
Ideaspace also lets you build a glossary for your idea pyramid. You can add terms one at a time or assimilate an entire glossary from another Ideaspace file.
View from the Top lets you view your categories, themes and ideas as an expandable/contractable outline of your entire project. Searching and filtering functions and opportunities to create network linkages abound throughout the program. Ideaspace content can be printed directly or transferred to any word processing program.
Ideaspace contains an Overview, a Quick Tutorial and a Full Tutorial as well as Help Materials. The program is user friendly and easily grasped, and the embedded support materials provide an explanation of all the features. If a question does arise that goes beyond the support materials, contact us and we will try to answer it. If your needs go beyond what we can do for free, further support is available for a fee.
Use Ideaspace to provide a foundation of thought for whatever end result you have in mind - paper, speech, dissertation, book, team research project, strategic guidance, legislative debate, new course, focus group report, administrative data.
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Copyright © 2007 | Ideaspace, LLC | 925 Euclid Avenue, Suite 2000 | Cleveland, Ohio 44115 |
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