Grounded Theory 1

This idea that "the data will just talk to you" is not only intangible, it is really scary. I was having nightmares involving all this labels, with these strange names and no faces talking to me in this strange sort of elvish/welsh. It felt really not-nice.

But today Simon -- my supervisor in this adventurous project -- shed some light into the matter with a good explanation of Grounded Theory.

First things first: Glazer is not a guy to trust much, at least not if you want to add some practicality to your life. Second, I secretly think he also had some horrible dreams of data talking to him at some point of his life. So he came up with this really good restaurant example

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First you get the open coding, when you just put labels in things. It is like adding stickers to a big folder. Then you things that go together, well, together. This is the axial coding, when the relationships between the things you named before start to "emerge" (I don´t like that word much). Finally you find this one central thing, that is supposed to be the focus of the whole data set you collected, and that is the your problem, and you arrange things around it. This is "the funneling process" I talk about in my proposal.

Obviously, these were not Simon's exact words, it is just my take on what he said.

The whole thing is less loose than I imagined it could be. But there is a huge risk of getting into a very big mess if the interpretation is not coherent. I also think that there will be a "freaking out moment", when nothing will actually make any sense. I need to trust it and go ahead.

PS: The next two posts were originally put with this one. To make justice to the current area of concern, I should be able to label things better, at least on my own blog. So I made different posts for each theme, despite the fact that they all happened today.

Academic Self-Esteem (with capital letters)

The other good point I got from today is that I need to learn to trust my project. I suffer from academic-low-self-esteem, maybe because I am not an academic person. I am quite a nerd though, so shouldn't really be so skeptical about the ideas I have and mainly about the potential of this project. Being insecure sucks, so I shouldn't be. From now on I will see this project as a cool thing to do and with a LOT of potential. I'd better bloody believe it, otherwise nobody else will.

People I should talk to

We also talked about me contacting the people Dr. Finkelstein recommended:

- Marina Jirotka, a lecturer at Oxford University who recently did an ethnography with the stock market brokers. I would love to know how she did this!

- Paul Luff and Christian Heath, from Kings College, who did the famous LUL project

- Dani Miller. I still don't know exactly who this is, but he is from the Anthropology Department at UCL, therefore, must be an interesting person.

There is another anthropologist I should talk to, called Caroline Hightmeyer, from LSE. I still have very little information about her, so I shall ask Dr. Finkelstein about it.