In the past I would hear about coding in class or the doc room and only have a vague notion about what that really meant. I certainly did not understand how it was performed. Often I would think about another type of coding, the computer programming type, which involves plenty of organizational skills, heaps of documentation writing, and an ability to perform tedious tasks. After the class activity, class discussion and the week’s readings, I can see how I was only partially correct. Unlike most computer programming books, the two chapters by Charmaz are engaging and imbued the process with enthusiasm. Coding research data does require organizational skills. The identified topics and concepts from the text need to be sorted and resorted into “buckets.” There is also a level of organization required to keep the data, notes, and memos in order. Coding data does involve heaps of documentation writing. I am definitely a convert to the copious memo writing method. This method keeps someone from making decisions on what is important from preconceived ideas rather than allowing the data to show one the concepts and themes organically. This process of looking at each item and delaying a decision, if it is not obvious what it means, is useful to me. It forces me to consider each piece of information on its own terms. It also keeps me from skipping over something that I would not deem as important at the time. This last point is something that I need to be mindful about. The class activity pointed out somethings I missed from the data that my partner or the whole class did identify. Finally there is my preconceived notion that it is tedious. I found this not to be true. The process reminds me of card sorting method. Identify the elements and then start sorting the information into buckets in information architecture is analogous to writing memos, sorting them into concepts, and then sorting those concepts into themes. I enjoyed the short exercise we had in class and believe that I would feel the same way after a several hours of coding data.