Welcome to Article 15 of UNE Leximancer Affair – a regular column of this Bulletin dedicated to keeping the UNE community abreast with the functionality and development of Leximancer software. The main purpose of this article is simply to inform members of the UNE research community that are using Leximancer about a technicality of our Site Licence, which users need to be aware of so as to be able to continue using Leximancer for their data analysis.

As part of the on-going refinement of Leximancer, and also because of the annual nature of our Site Licence, even though the main interface of Leximancer remains true to the graphic illustrated above, users now need to upgrade their software. In practical terms, this means that the Leximancer you have on your computer self-destructed at the end of October 2008 and you need an updated version to use over the period, November 2008 to October 2009. While you cannot access your processed files until you have the upgrade installed on your computer, please be assured that your data remains as processed. Therefore, when you re-install Leximancer, you will be able to access your data and work further with it without losing any time or data. To get the updated version, either send me an email so we can work out a time when I could come and install the updated software. Follow this option if you are a desktop user. Otherwise, please email me to arrange a time when you can bring your laptop to my office for the installation of the update. My contact email and phone number are given in my signature below. I apologise for any inconvenience this might cause.

CDKivunja
Dr Charles Kivunja
Lecturer in School Pedagogy
Leximancer Project Officer
Email: ckivunja@une.edu.au
Phone: 6773 2005

Welcome to Article 14 of UNE Leximancer Affair – a regular column of this Bulletin dedicated to keeping the UNE community abreast with the functionality and development of Leximancer software. The last 7 articles in this series have provided a step by step enlightenment on the functionality of Leximancer using Leximancer’s main interface illustrated below, as the basis for the illumination. This article is significantly different from the last 7 in that it gives an update of the Leximancer community which is clearly on the increase not only at UNE but also in other Australian Universities, Australian states and overseas.

As we celebrate the first anniversary of UNE Leximancer Affair, it is an opportune time to review some of the milestones that our Affair has experienced over the last twelve months. Soon after UNE had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Leximancer Pty Ltd in October last year, UNE became a dedicated test site for the new version of Leximancer code named Leximancer Beta 3.0. The MOU was a significant achievement because it bestowed upon us, the right to use both Leximancer 2.25 and 3.0 for our research and publication without any restriction. Training was given to 53 academics and 5 PhD students in the use of Leximancer last October. This was followed by the formation of a Committee of 12 testers who are working on the Beta version of Leximancer and providing feedback to Leximancer engineers so that the software can be refined further.

Early this year, the MOU was upgraded into a full fledged Academic Site Licence which formalised our partnership with Leximancer Pty Ltd. This means that UNE has access to the latest updates of Leximancer through sharing in Leximancer’s advanced product development program and ongoing scientific research.

At this year’s Postgraduate Research Conference 20 students and five academics attended a training session in the use of Leximancer. As a spin-off from that training, Leximancer was installed on 12 Laptops for our PhD students who are using Leximancer in their data analysis. Additionally, at the invitation of Dr. Helen Edwards, I trained 10 students and 2 academics in Leximancer this September as part of Research Methods 2 – EDUC591.

UNE Leximancer Affair went world-wide in September when I started a UNE Leximancer Blog. Linking the Blog to my email signature means that by simply clicking on the Url in my signature at http://www.une.edu.au/staff/ckivunja.php readers are instantly taken to the Blog. This exposure has led to an invitation to in-service academics and PhD researchers at UWS and to an Executive Luncheon at Leximancer Pty Ltd in Queensland to attend the launch of the latest upgrade of Leximancer this October. Moreover, next month I will present a paper on Leximancer functionality at the International Conference of APERA (Asia Pacific Educational Research Association) in Singapore. So; colleagues, do you Leximancer? What are you waiting for?

Welcome to Article 13 of UNE Leximancer Affair – a regular column of this Bulletin
dedicated to keeping the UNE community abreast with the functionality and
development of Leximancer software. This article outlines the final phase of data processing, which actually generates Leximancer’s Concept Map.

As the name of this stage suggests, in this phase, the map displaying the relationships among the variables investigated is displayed. This label needs explaining because, even though it is called a Concept Map, it contains a lot more information than the key concepts in the data.

The most prominent feature of the Map are the multi-coloured circles. These circles represent the key Themes in the data rather than Concepts. The circles are shown in different colours. The brighter the colour, the higher the dominance of the theme. The circles are dispersed on the map according to the degree of co-occurrence of the themes in the data. Intersecting circles show co-occurrence of themes. Circles that are further apart show themes that don’t move together in the data.

Concepts are enclosed within the circle representing the theme to which they belong. They are shown as multi-coloured blobs. Again the colour coding serves the same purpose as that described above for themes. As one would expect, the most prominent concept within a theme, is given the same name as the theme. Other concepts that occur within that theme are then clustered around the key concept within the theme.

Detailed information about each concept, within and across themes can be investigated by working several navigation buttons which enable you to call up relationships among concepts and supporting evidence from within the data.

In addition to themes and Concepts, this stage also generates statistical data which can be used to analyse the Relative and Absolute Frequencies of all the concepts.

CDKivunja
Dr. Charles Kivunja
Lecturer in School Pedagogy
School of Education
Email: ckivunja@une.edu.au
Ext: 2005

Welcome to Article 12 of UNE Leximancer Affair – a regular column of this Bulletin
dedicated to keeping the UNE community abreast with the functionality and development
of Leximancer software.
We saw, in the Thesaurus Learning stage 5 of Leximancer
processes, that a weighted accumulation of evidence occurring in the data is automatically
used to define concepts. This article highlights how that automation can be disabled to
help you refine your data.

Article 13 of Leximancer Affair will start an in-depth exploration of the co-occurrence of concepts in a Concept Map.

CDKivunja
Dr. Charles Kivunja
Lecturer in School Pedagogy
School of Education
Email: ckivunja@une.edu.au
Ext: 2005

Following a discussion of Concept Editing in Article 10, the present Article highlights how Leximancer learns the thesaurus of words that she uses to finally define a Concept.

Article 12 of Leximancer Affair will explore the benefits of concept coding, the Leximancer way.

Dr Charles Kivunja
Lecturer in School Pedagogy
School of Education
Telephone: 02 6773 2005
email: ckivunja@une.edu.au

Following a discussion of Automatic Concept Identification in Article 9, the present Article illustrates and outlines the brain centre of Leximancer functionality, namely Concept Editing.

Our Leximancer Affair in the next Edition will explain how you can teach Leximancer new concepts.

Dr Charles Kivunja
Lecturer in School Pedagogy
School of Education
Telephone: 02 6773 2005
email: ckivunja@une.edu.au

Following on Article 8, which explained File Selection and Text Pre-processing, this issue highlights stage 3 from the main interface illustrated below.

More on the next four stages in the next edition of our Leximancer Affair.

Dr Charles Kivunja
Lecturer in School Pedagogy
School of Education
Telephone: 02 6773 2005
email: ckivunja@une.edu.au

As promised in Article 7, this issue starts an extension of our understanding of the different stages through which Leximancer processes the data to generate the final products. The 7 stages are illustrated in the Figure. The first 2 are explained in this edition.

More on the other 4 stages next time

Dr Charles Kivunja
Lecturer in School Pedagogy
School of Education
Telephone: 02 6773 2005
email: ckivunja@une.edu.au

A substantial portion of the earlier information in this Bulletin about Leximancer’s functionality has focused on an understanding of Leximancer’s primary product – the Concept Map. Whereas the Concept Map gives a bird’s eye view of the relational contents in a given set of data, it needs to be interpreted with an understanding of how Leximancer generates it. This entails a look at the processing stages through which Leximancer reads the words in your textual data before configuring the concepts which are then grouped into thematic circles. A simplified view of this process is illustrated in Figure 1. Article 8 in this series will start to explain the different stages through which Leximancer processes the data that eventually leads to the Concept Map.

If you want to have a go at the new Leximancer Version 2.25 or the new Version 3, do not hesitate to contact me as per details below.

Hoping to see you Leximancer soon.

Dr Charles Kivunja
Lecturer in School Pedagogy
School of Education
Telephone: 02 6773 2005
email: ckivunja@une.edu.au

First, there was Leximancer 2.25. Now there is Leximancer Version 3 which is set to revolutionise the way we analyse qualitative data. Since the introduction of Leximancer to UNE late last year, twelve UNE researchers volunteered to participate in the development of a new version of Leximancer known as Leximancer Version 3. These researchers have the opportunity to analyse data with the latest technology being developed by Leximancer. This new model not only drives faster along all roads that Version 2.25 travels but it introduces, among other things, an analytical feature called “Knowlegde Pathway”. This is illustrated in Figure 1 by the bold arrowed ray starting from the blue casual teacher thematic circle leftwards to the pink casual work theme. The Pathway connects casual, school, teach, work, time, strategies and resources. This is called a “Knowledge Pathway”. Once this Pathway is generated across concepts in the data, a single click reveals the most likely path in conceptual space from the start concept (casual teacher) to the end concept (resources). In effect it gives you all the information that shows how these concepts are interrelated. This enables you to gain knowledge of the relationships that exist among the variables in the Pathway. If you want to have a go at the new Leximancer Version 3, do not hesitate to contact me as per details below.

Hoping to see you Leximancer soon.

Dr Charles Kivunja
Lecturer in School Pedagogy
School of Education
Telephone: 02 6773 2005
email: ckivunja@une.edu.au