My social media feeds are full of colleagues and strangers making presentations at conferences and showcasing articles and books they have written. I like to see those posts and never fail to congratulate them on their accomplishments. I too blog about the conferences I and my research team attend and post pictures and links to my new publications. There is nothing wrong with being proud of one's accomplishments.
However, once in a while I would like to see posts about the (often tedious) process of analyzing data and the anquish that accompanies crafting texts based on those analyses. Afterall the articles and books don't just magically get published. A lot of work goes into preparing both presentations and publications. Why aren't we writing about writing?
Where do you write? What do you need to have a good writing session?
My late professor was always curious about the environment good writers, academics or novelists, needed to produce interesting work. She wanted to know if they wrote in long hand or on a typewriter (mind you, this was before computers existed!); if they sipped tea or wine while writing; if they were early birds or night owls; when were they most productive. She used the Polish word warsztat to inquire about the craft of writing. Literal translation of warsztat is workshop, but the English translation doesn't do justice to the Polish word as it encompases both the academic mechanics of writing and the ambiance. For me, flowers and a pot of good tea are essential to a good writing session.
I love to read about how other writers write. Here is an interview with one of my favorite novelists, Viet Thanh Nguyen, pictured here in front of his house in Pasadena, CA. It turns out, he needs caffeine, but really no music; if he listens to music, there has to be instrumental music as lirics distarct him. I am the same way, I listen mainly to classical music when I write, but honestly most of the time, I prefer silence.
What about analysis? Do you use computer software? Or are you more old fashioned?
There is a number of computer programs to aid anthropologists and other qualitative researchers in analyzing text data. Ethnograph was one of the first programs to pioneer computer assisted qualitative data analysis. It can directly import text-based qualitative data from any word processing program as well as search and note segments of interest within data, mark them with code words, and run analyses. Ethnograph works with data files such as interview transcripts, field notes, open-ended survey responses, or other text based documents. I have also used NVivo. It was useful, especially when I had a large research team and lots of research assistants. We each could code the data separately and speed up the work. However, it also required a lot of quality control and constant discussions about taxonomies. However, when I work solo on a project, I revert to the old fashioned color coding text, either on a hard copy or in a PDF. I also like to listen to my interview recordings, not rely only on transcriptions. Afterall, anthropologists not only want to know what their interviewees said but how they said it!
Anthropologists need software but software engineers need anthropologists. Charles P.earson explains why.
The Pied Piper team didn’t step out of their echo chamber, and ultimately failed completely to understand the values and expectations of their potential users. They didn’t design with them in mind. Consequently, the team’s enginneer’y values and assumptions, explicit in the platform, were completely irrelevant to everybody else.
How do you write?
Do you take lots of notes and then edit them into a coherent text? I am not that kind of a writer. I need to be fully satisfied with a paragraph I am writing before I move onto the next one. It means I write slowly, but hopefully well...
Enough musings for one morning, back to analyzing and writing...
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