Emergent Coding Analysis
From Dar
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exerpt from future report:
- I was tasked with analysing a chat transcript to draw out specific lines of enquiry.
- Method
- After some technical experimenting I rejected the technique of colour coding and decided to allocate a seperate page to each code instead, quite literally sorting the data by shifting it around rather than just coding or tagging it.
- 1) The full transcript was pasted into a blank document.
- 2) Starting at the top, I took the first discrete idea and assigned to it a topic name. I typed in that topic name and turned it into a hyperlink. I then scoop up the relevent text, cut it from the main page, click on the hyperlink to create a new topic page, and paste the text into there. This plays to the strengths of personal wiki sofware - evolved for the purposes of 'agile programming'
- Single pass
- At this point, the literature would suggest passing through the entire data to look for further instances of the same idea or code, then starting again at the beginning to deal with the second one, and so on. A bit like a pyramid sort. Instinctively I felt this to be time consuming rather than efficient, and a few days had already passed since the chat took place, so I determined to systematically codify the data in one pass, dealing with a growing number of category pages simultaneously, concentrating on exhausting each idea or sentence in the same sequence as originally made. A synchronous chat is not totally synchronous at all, participants tend to take their eyes off any new messages while composing a response, so that when the response is posted, it may appear two or three comments further down than the one it pertains to. That can make it quite difficut to follow the threads of conversation, and tends to create simultaneous interweaved threads which the emergent coding analysis technique proved to be good at sorting and recombining.
