Two new directions

I was introduced to the appraisal framework (Martin & White 2005) recently which would provide a nice theoretical grounding to further work on conceptual conflation of research vs evaluation as well as perceptions of evaluation in general.

Website and corresponding references here: http://grammatics.com/appraisal/index.html and an overview here: http://grammatics.com/appraisal/AppraisalOutline/Framed/Frame.htm

and latest book: http://students.lti.cs.cmu.edu/11899/files/LanguageofEvaluationBook.pdf

Another thread I need to follow is a special edition of New Directions fo Evaluation (2003): 

The Practice-Theory Relationship in Evaluation and in particular the editors study: 
What Guides Evaluation? A Study of How Evaluation Practice Maps onto Evaluation Theory
and Henry and Mark's: Toward an Agenda for Research on Evaluation
Rounding off with Alkin's: Evaluation Theory and Practice: Insights and New Directions

Nvivo

Have recently completed a 2 day training course on this software. Whilst I'm not certain about the possibility of using this (as I do not use a PC), I think the sessions got me thinking about my data and what I could consider.

It's really a very good tool for organising and linking all of your documents and links etc together. What I did manually with a Word doc was very similar to what it can do for you. It has great tools for graphing/plotting your coding but you really have to put in the same effort as if doing it manually. I think Leximancer is more powerful - but I lack an understanding in the detail with Leximancer.