Boggled eyes and fellow conspirators

There's only so much data you can look at before your eyes start focusing independently, or cease to focus at all.

I'm so so so lucky with my fellow conspirators (officially collaborators, but sometimes we feel a little more like conspirators). We talk, we think, we chip in. And we are uncompromsingly honest and humblingly (if that's a word) vulnerable with each other.

And we generate a LOT data.

I've just worked through a 54 page transcript for the second time. And that was from our shortest meeting.

So I'm giving my eyes a bit of a break to blog. I'm so glad I got thrown out of my Latin class and sent to the typing group in my distant youth. It means I can touch-type this while looking out of the lead glass windows of the Management Centre and across the Menai Straits to Anglesey so my poor eyes can relax and unwind.

I'm not sure if it is as easy for my brain to unwind. Half of me is blogging, and the other half is still thinking about the key categories and themes that seem to be emerging - that half of me is turning them over in my mind and wondering if they are keepers or for discarding as distractions.

I'm so glad it's not all up to me!

That's one of the joys of doing what is loosely a collaborative analytic autoethnography*. I don't have to come up with the answers. I can work with five perspectives, sometimes given independent of each other, sometimes given as we work together during discussions.

The downside for my poor boggled eyes is that I get five times the data to look through - repeatedly. I'm the only one of us who is trying to get a postgraduate qualification out of this, so I'm the only one who has to work quite so rigorously with the data.

Onwards and upwards - or deeper down the rabbit hole. Time to get back to those data.

*It's definitely collaborative. It's definitely analytic - with more than a touch of evocative from one of us. And it's ethnographic - I guess? I've never quite got my head round what makes something an ethnography. And we are writing personally about our personal experience and views. But unlike CAEs that I've read about, we are focusing on a single shared event (a "coffee shop conversation" rather than a life experience that has been part of each of our lives (like experience of oppression or motherhood or being disabled). It's also different from CAEs that I've read because I'm the only academic-ish person; my collaborators/conspirators are friends from outside the academy. 

To blog is to think (the joys of pre-coding)

I started blogging because I wanted to get practise in the art of writing and seeing what comes out.

I wanted to practise blogging because I know good research notes are vital for at least two reasons.

• We forget the facts and details when we finally come to write up our research, so we need notes written at the time to which we can refer. 
• Blogging to ourselves is about the only way to keep a record of our thought processes as we analyse our data. 

I've started data analysis and I'm blogging my thoughts as I go (into the same Word document that I'm using for my pre-coding data analysis work). And I can see just  how vital it is that I blog as a record of my thought processes. What I've done is

• read a transcript
• re-read and underline bits that look interesting
• type the interesting words/phrases into Word while roughly grouping words/phrases together
• go back over the groupings to see if they do group together enough to merit a heading (a kind of pre-code). 
• go off for a stiff coffee
• come back and looked at the groupings and headings and add some blog-type notes underneath each grouping
• have more coffee
• look at the groupings, look at the blog notes and (in many cases) add a second blog

and all of that is before I've even got to coding, or comparing transcripts.

What I didn't realise before I started blogging is that it is only as I put things into words that I realise what I am thinking. In fact, it's more than that. It is as I put things into words that I form my thinking; and as I hit the backspace key to re-draft the words, I am refining, changing and clarifying my thinking. The very act of blogging, of forcing myself to put things into words, creates my thinking. And in the same act of blogging, I get a record of what my thinking was.

So there are times in my transcript blogs when I've had to stop myself hitting the backspace key.  Instead, I add an extra bit in square brackets, because my first thought was valid as I thought it. And I need to keep that thought, captured for posterity (or at least until I've published the research), because it is part of the trail of how my thinking about the data has developed. I may never need to look back over that trail, although I think I will want to out of curiousity. But what is very sure is that if I ever did need to examine the trail, I could never recreate it because as soon as a thought has been superceded, I tend to forget it.

There you have it. Time for me to get back to the transcript blogs. I won't be inflicting any of those on you, having been to a fascinating talk about how anything that has been blogged online counts as having been published, so it becomes really complicated when you later want to use it in a research degree dissertation/thesis. Or something like that. Not sure I really understood!

Hope the detail of how I've done some of my pre-coding analysis is helpful to some of you. I'm not saying I've done my pre-coding brilliantly, but it can be really hard to find out what actually goes on between raw transcript and formal coding.