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sure is that if I ever did need to examine the trail, I could never recreate it because as soon as a thought has been superceded, I tend to forget it.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.