Ethnographic Coding Wiki (ARCHIVE)

[amelia]

Please document any technical issues you have that you need matthias to address here (and tag him):
https://edgeryders.eu/t/open-ethnographer-wishlist-and-issue-log/14088/

I have no bandwidth left this week but could meet early next week if that works for you both.

[amelia]

We are also going to stop using a separate tab for “comments” and instead use the comment function of google sheets even for our own comments so that others can reply in that comment thread, rather than creating visual chaos on the codebook. See my codebook as an example. I have updated the wiki accordingly.

[Jan]

@amelia Many thanks. Early next week (Monday?) would be perfect, as @Wojt and I will be much better prepared and advanced. We have observed a lot of chaos in one of the codes (Catholic Church) that is incredibly important. I will try to describe the problem for Matthias today.

[Jan]

Noted. I know how to insert comments but do not understand how the notification system works. You wrote earlier: “Leave comments attached to particular cells using the comment function on Google Sheets, so that the ethnographer receives a notification when comments have been made.” And you made a lot comments on our codebook (thank you!), but I have not received any notifications? Please help me understand - I may be doing something wrong? What do you mean by “notification”, exactly"

[Wojt]

I think it may have something to do with the fact that you are not logged in with your google account. I sometimes have problems sharing some documents with you since the systems seems to be using your ucl account email address.

[amelia]

@amelia

Code only what has meaning

Back to ethnography as an interpretive method. One way not to overproliferate codes is to make sure that a code is only applied if the community member uses the concept meaningfully .

For example, if an event takes place in the United States, but the activities that happened at the event are not meaningfully connected to the fact that the event took place in the United States, in your interpretive assessment, do not apply that code. If, however, the fact that a certain activity happened in Prague (a major city) rather than a rural area, apply the code Prague . Use SSNA thinking here: a co-occurrence network around cities might differ substantially to one around a rural area (certain ideas might be more widely held and repeated in the capital city than in a rural town, for example), which we would want to capture in the SSNA. Code with intention and interpretively.

As another example, a community member might mention that they are 50 years old. You would only apply the code age if age was a meaningful frame used by the community member – if the story was about growing older and life changing, for example. But if the fact is incidental and they go on to talk about monster truck racing , do not apply the code age .

@Wojt @Jan This is what we were discussing today.

[amelia]

@alberto

Thinking in network when coding: mapping coding to network structure

Basic concepts

When you code with Open Ethnographer, you are implicitly arranging codes in a graph. The basic graph structure is something like this:

added this to the Open Ethnographer Manual (7.4)