Pretty much on what I tried to say in Mangrove effect: the value of making things explicit – but narrowed down to writing as a method of data analysis:
I use writing as a method of data analysis by using writing to think; that is, I wrote my way into particular spaces I could not have occupied by sorting data with a computer program or by analytic induction. This was rhizomatic work (Deleuze&Guattari, 1980/1987) in which I made accidental and fortuitous connections I could not foresee or control. My point here is that I did not limit data analysis to conventional practices of coding data and then sorting it into categories that I then grouped into themes that became section headings in an outline that organized and governed my writing in advance of writing. Thought happened in the writing. As I wrote, I watched word after word appear on the computer screen – ideas, theories, I had not thought before I wrote them. [p.970]
And another one, just because it takes to the extreme some of my feelings (=I’m more moderate about audit trails and data saturation :)
And it is thinking of writing in this way that breaks down the distinction in conventional qualitative inquiry between data collection and data analysis – one more assault to the structure. Both happen at once. [...] Data collection and data analysis cannot be separated when writing is a method of inquiry. And positivist concepts, such as audit trails and data saturation, become absurd and then irrelevant in postmodern qualitative inquiry in which writing is a field of play where anything can happen – and it does. [p.971]
Both quotes are from Richardson, L. & St.Pierre, E. A. (2005). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N.K.Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 959-978). SAGE Publications.
Wikipedia entry on rhizome in philosophy: I don’t understand much, but the fact that Carl Jung used the word “to emphasize the invisible and underground nature of life” is intriguing.
Tags: invisible, methodology, writingArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/06/20.html#a1912; comments are here.
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