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| dtSearch Case Study — The
Tsunami Evaluation Coalition |
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| dtSearch
is a Key Tool in Humanitarian Projects |
“I
have been using dtSearch for working with
large data sets in humanitarian evaluations
for the last five years, and it is an essential
tool for working with such large sets of documents.”
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John
Cosgrave is the Evaluation Advisor and Coordinator
for the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition. The Tsunami
Evaluation Coalition is a joint initiative
by UN agencies, Donor Governments, the Red
Cross, Non-Governmental Organisations and the
Active Learning Network on Accountability and
Performance in Humanitarian Action (ALNAP).
ALNAP is an international, interagency forum
working to improve learning, accountability
and performance across the Humanitarian Sector.
“Evaluations of humanitarian relief programmes
are one of the principle ways in which humanitarian
agencies can improve their performance," said
Mr. Cosgrave "We hope to learn from
the experience of the response in one emergency
to have a better quality response in the next
one.” |
“Using
dtSearch Publish allows me to distribute CD-ROMs
with evaluation data-sets to colleagues in
the field, so that they can use the power
of dtSearch to interrogate the data-sets.”
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“One of the problems with
evaluating large-scale humanitarian operations
is the sheer number of documents that the evaluation
team has to deal with," continued Mr.
Cosgrave. "A crisis like the Indian
Ocean Tsunami in December 2004 can generate huge
amounts of documents. ReliefWeb, the key resource
website for humanitarian response, was publishing
about one thousand documents a week at the start
of the Tsunami. A major evaluation can have thousands
of source documents. You can’t possibly read
all of them, and you can’t ignore them either.”
For working with these data sets, Mr. Cosgrave chose dtSearch. “I
have been using dtSearch for working with large data sets in humanitarian evaluations
for the last five years, and it is an essential tool for working with such large
sets of documents. dtSearch allows me to quickly process thousands of documents,
and then to search them with sophisticated searches to find documents dealing
with specific issues.”
Mr. Cosgrave particularly liked dtSearch's search option selection. "dtSearch’s
can be used to search for concepts (through the relative position of words) rather
than words alone. One simple example was where we wanted to find documents
that referred to the different impact of the Tsunami on men and women. We just
search for the occurrence of 'men' within a few words of 'women,' while excluding
all documents where 'men' 'women' and 'children' are close together (so as to
exclude documents which talk about 'men, women, and children'). This immediately
gives us a small set of documents to look through for what we are interested
in, a huge time-saving for the evaluation team. dtSearch also allows me
to automatically search large document sets for keywords (and their frequency)
and then process this information using a spreadsheet to automatically generate
bibliographic databases where keywords are set for documents based on a certain
minimum prevalence in a document.”
For CD/DVD publication, Mr. Cosgrave chose dtSearch Publish. "Using
dtSearch Publish allows me to distribute CD-ROMs with evaluation data-sets to
colleagues in the field, so that they can use the power of dtSearch to interrogate
the data-sets. I regularly distribute reference document sets when I am doing
training in the field. dtSearch Publish will cut down the time it takes me to
develop such sets, and make them more useful in the field through adding powerful
search facilities."
For more information on ALNAP and the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition's organizational
information and extensive work in the relief sector, please visit ALNAP at www.alnap.org or
the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition www.alnap.org/tec. Please see ReliefWeb
www.ReliefWeb.int for details of
current and past humanitarian responses. |
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