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.