I was excited to see and read the article on coding, as I will need that particular skill during my dissertation work (as I’m sure many of us will). Actually doing the coding was less exciting, and more on the tedious side. However, I think some of that has to do with it not being my own research. I definitely learned that I need either a good amount of control over my data from the beginning, or a very strong interest in whatever I’m coding.
I think I will definitely be a proponent of the Kazmer method of starting with the word by word coding and then moving more to the bigger units as I go along. I can see where it would be beneficial. I also appreciated the memoing when first looking at data to code, as it made me think about how I wanted to approach the information. Working with Information Worlds Theory, I will have a codebook, but I think it will help if I first read through and memo without the codebook in front of me to get some initial ideas, and then go back and look at those memos with codebook in hand.
In short, reading about and then practicing coding gave me some very good ideas for my own data analysis, as well as my data collection. A resounding theme throughout this class has been to be very detailed and thorough, and this was yet another lesson in why that is important.