Bringing Out the Best in Evernote with ATLAS.ti 8 Windows

Auth0r: Ani Munirah Mohamad

Have you ever heard of Evernote before?

Well, unless you are living completely outside of the digital world, you should be well-informed that Evernote is one of the world’s most preferred note taking applications, according to PC Mag (2017), Business News Daily (2016), Mac World (2014) and a bunch of other technology review websites.Using the tagline: “Capture what’s on your mind”, Evernote can be installed on a variety of devices, such as iPad, iPhone, Android, Windows and Mac-based machines. It can hold notes in various formats, such as images, audio/video attachments, reminders, typed texts as well as handwritten data. This article explores how a qualitative researcher can make great use of Evernote up to the stage of analysis of the Evernote data in ATLAS.ti 8 Windows.

Potential of using Evernote in a qualitative research

In conducting qualitative research, we can create notes in Evernote by:

Conducting online research – ‘clipping’ websites directly to be saved in Evernote

Literature search and review – attaching PDF and Word documents in Evernote

Fieldwork data collection – adding images, typed notes and handwritten scribbles in Evernote

Interview/focus group – attaching audio/video/images in Evernote

Many other ways… The potential is so huge!

Great! We already have all our data centralized in Evernote.

Now we need to think about how to analyse these data. Great news! We can import the Evernote data into ATLAS.ti 8 Windows for the purpose of analysis.

How to import Evernote data into ATLAS.ti 8 Windows

First and foremost, we would need an Evernote account

Head on to www.evernote.com to create an account, if we do not have onw. The basic account is free, with an option to upgrade to the paid account for more features. We can load data into our account for the purpose of analysis. An example of Evernote data in Android is shown in Image 1.

Image 1. Example of Evernote data.

Select Import/Export

In ATLAS.ti 8 Windows, choose the Import/Export tab, and select the ‘Evernote’ option, as shown in Image 2.

Image 2. Choose the Import/Export tab.

Authorize ATLAS.ti

We need to authorise our Evernote account for use in ATLAS.ti – For first time usage, we are requested to authorize our Evernote account to be used with ATLAS.ti. For this purpose, we would be asked to login to our account, as shown in Image 3.

Image 3. Authorizing Evernote usage.

Thereafter, we are requested to confirm the authorization, as shown in Image 4.

Image 4. Confirming the Evernote authorization.

Select Evernote notebooks or notes

Once authorized, we will be prompted to select which Evernote notebooks or notes to import to ATLAS.ti. Simply check the notebooks or notes that we wish to import into ATLAS.ti for the purpose of analysis, as shown in Image 5.

Image 5. Choosing the notebooks or notes from Evernote.

Once successful, the imported data from Evernote will appear as Documents in ATLAS.ti, as shown in Image 6.

Image 6. The Evernote import is successful.

Analyze the Evernote data

Once all our data from Evernote have been imported to ATLAS.ti, we can then use the many great features of ATLAS.ti to analyse the Documents. We could group the Documents into specific Document Groups based on its respective shared characteristics, we could go through the Documents by using the Codes and Memos functions, add comments to the Documents, Codes and Memos, visualize the analyzing using the Networks function, and many more great features of ATLAS.ti!

Conclusion

Evernote import is one of the many great features of ATLAS.ti 8 Windows. ATLAS.ti strives hard to provide great avenues for the support of researchers carrying out a qualitative research. Hopefully, this brief article could shed some light on maximizing the usage of Evernote for note taking and collection of data for the purpose of analysis in ATLAS.ti.

References

(1) Duffy, J. (2017). The Best Note Taking Apps of 2017. Online, available at http://www.pcmag.com/roundup/347537/the-best-note-taking-and-syncing-apps accessed 10 May 2017.

(2) Nuckles, B. (2016). 7 Best Note Taking Apps. Online, available at http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/6065-best-note-taking-apps.html accessed 10 May 2017.

(3) Mathis, J. (2014). The best apps for taking notes. Online, available at http://www.macworld.com/article/2599838/the-best-apps-for-taking-notes.html accessed 10 May 2017.