Voices in the Feminine - Digital Delights

The digitization of academic research has followed a pattern similar to consumer electronics, beginning with large, clunky devices and database machines filling entire rooms and evolving to Web-based software. The first breakthrough came when the first desktop scientific calculator was released by Hewlett-Packard in 1968 and subsequently popularized by Texas Instruments as a handheld device in the 1970s. Also in the late 1960s -- the heyday for mainframe computing -- a software program called SPSS emerged that allowed corporations and academic researchers to do complex data analysis.

All of these tools are helpful for crunching data once you have it, but it has taken a while to close the loop on digitizing the research process. In the last decade, new technology has improved the way we actually collect information, as well. In my field of study (organizational behavior), our research focuses on people. We survey them, observe them and put them through controlled experiments to gauge perceptions, attitudes, behaviors and other insights about what "makes us tick" and how we work together.