askSam Used in Research Projects by Karl Kasca

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"I use askSam, but still consider myself somewhat of a novice as I'm still learning about different uses of the product and I haven't had any formal training in it so far I've just used the manuals that came with the CD.  By the way, if anyone is apprehensive about beginning their first askSam project, here's my biggest tip: Just pull out the really thin 'Getting Started Installation & Tutorial' pamphlet and zip through it and you'll be up & running in askSam in no time.

My bottom-line is that askSam is a very valuable tool/resource for handling large amounts of data.  This is a tremendous value to Information Professionals/Researchers because we encounter so many resources and data within our research that sometimes it's difficult to “pull it all together” and “make sense of it”.  With askSam this sometimes-formidable task is greatly facilitated.

Maybe the best way to illustrate this would be an example:

I did a market research project for a clamp manufacturer. The clamp company had lost touch with their client-base, e.g., who is currently using their clamps and for what purposes (this is what I would call a “Uses and Users” project on clamps).  For this project I did searches using Dialog, Lexis-Nexis, Proquest, the Internet (using BullsEyePRO, 'free' Web searches, and specific Web searches, e.g., discussion groups).

First I 'normalized' the data a bit in separate Microsoft WORD documents using specifically phrased 'Find & Replace'(s) and some manual (grunt) inserting/editing of words like, 'SOURCE:' 'ARTICLE#:' 'JOURNAL:' etc. Sometimes I use MS-WORD macros to do this too, especially if there's a lot of consistent inserting/editing to be done. By the way, if anyone finds a Macro/text editor that's easier to use than MS-OFFICE's Visual Basic please let me know, since I'm not planning on becoming a VBA programmer anytime soon!

Also, I inserted some unique text at the start of each 'article'. This is so askSam can recognize the beginning of each article (or 'document' in askSam).  I like to use “~!@” (or, Shift & “`12”, the first three keys in the upper left of your keyboard, without the quotation marks). In most cases I use Find & Replace to do this.

Then I copied all of the data/information into a single WORD Text document and imported it into askSam4PRO (PRO can index 'large' databases more efficiently). Using the unique text at the start of each 'article', I could then have askSam separate each 'article' into a separate 'document'. Then I had askSam automatically (!) recognize all of the data fields, e.g., any text after a colon (for instance, any text after 'SOURCE:') would be considered data.

From there I could search all of the 'documents' for specific information of interest using Boolean (or other searches) and see particular results.

Also, I could create various askSam reports using ALL of the data from my research. These reports can also include askSam's version of what would be comparable to KWIC (Key Words in Context).  For example, the partial result for one 'document' from one report looked like:

SOURCE: DIALOG

ARTICLE#: 3

DATE: Feb. 28...

JOURNAL: Applied Physics...

TITLE: Photothermal spectroscopy using multilayer cantilever...

BODY:  The authors demonstrate photothermal spectroscopy using a

high-aspect-ratio multilayer cantilever to measure...

A comparison...accounts for conduction loss through the

cantilever clamp and to air along the length of the cantilever

surface is presented.

USE: Applied Physics research (cantilever clamp).

USER: Applied Physics researchers

   - (NOTE: I inserted the 'Use' & 'User' description Info manually).

Then I exported certain fields of this report's delimited text (*.csv) into an MS-EXCEL spreadsheet and created two (sorted) Pivot Tables based on the USES and USERS of the clamps, so the client could easily see the results of who is using clamps and what they are using them for. These were summarized to a higher level in the final report's conclusions, e.g., something like Physics, Researchers, or Scientists.

NOTE: As I said, I still consider myself to be somewhat of a novice with askSam, so there may have been a dynamite report format that would have achieved the same purpose as EXCEL, however sometimes you just have to “go with what you know” at the time to get a project done within the agreed-upon timeframe.  

It was also easy to do an askSam report of all Journals, listed alphabetically, with the Sources and article numbers. The list of Journals was to give the clamp company's CEO ideas of where they might consider placing advertisements for their clamps. The Sources and article numbers were so that the company could look up the original article in the search results to see more about the Uses & Users if they wished.

Now, all of this might seem pretty easy for only 3 Dialog articles, 46 Lexis-Nexis stories, 38 Proquest documents, 42 Web results, or, 129 overall data sources.  But the combined text from all of these sources was 112 pages in MS-WORD. That's a lot of data to “hold in your head” if you were just trying to analyze this data manually, so askSam is very helpful for seeing not only the trees in the forest, but in identifying Groups of trees (which in this case represented the potential customer-base for my client. Also keep in mind that in the terms of sheer data this was actually a small project and askSam can be just as effective for large projects with many Megabytes of data, which “ups the ante” in human processing/analysis terms.

In another project I used the 'Show' command in an askSam Report to extract the sentences in the articles, which had the words 'Results' or 'Conclusions' in them. This was very effective in highlighting the bottom line for each article (in addition to the other data provided, e.g., the articles' citations, etc.). This was value-added considering that the initial Dialog data was 158 pages (about ½ Megabyte) in WORD. Another part of this project involved using askSam reports to summarize 826 pages of Lexis-Nexis data (about 2 Megabytes) in WORD using askSam reports. Clearly it's easy to see how helpful askSam's free-form database can be for analyzing large amounts of data.

Again, askSam is a very useful tool along with all of the other tools in our data analysis toolbox. I highly recommend it."

Karl Kasca

KASCA & ASSOCIATES

Information Research

Email:     kkasca@kasca.com

Website: http://www.kasca.com

Phone:   (626) 795-9568

Fax:       (626) 795-9569

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KASCA & ASSOCIATES finds information

that Businesses and Attorneys use to

make decisions and act on.

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