Let’s use this thread to discuss any and all coding in POPREBEL from here on out. If you haven’t seen it yet, I’ve also made a POPREBEL Coding Wiki for us to use and build upon. If you have specific comments on the wiki itself, feel free to comment on that thread instead.
An update from me: right now I am done with my coding sprint and am finishing up my coding categories – this should make it much easier to navigate my codes and apply them to your datasets. I’m in the process of using these to refine and merge my own codes before doing a final code review on each of your codes. Looking forward to seeing all of yours as well!
As a reminder, we are going to finish this coding sprint by July 1st. Please finish coding by this date (including creating your categories) and take til Friday this week to comment on others’ codebooks and especially look out for overlapping codes, so we can merge codes and have clean codebooks before I initiate the SSNA visualisation. If you need more time, please say so ASAP.
We’ll then schedule a call for late next week to discuss the visualisation and plan the writing of the update.
Sounds good. It is 11 am (Monday) here and I am going to start coding. At 2 pm, Wojtek and I have our next meeting. We will prepare as much as we can for July 1. My son and his fiancee are getting married on July 1, so I will disappear for a day, but on Thursday will return to coding and studying other’s codes.
@amelia Hello there, I cannot code for some reason. And I do not see my previous work in any of the texts that I coded before. Although the system still has my codes, I can see the annotations, etc. But the texts do not show the highlighted and coded fragments. J
Same here. I don’t see any of my previous codes within texts (they’re in the system though) and I cannot add any codes/annotations either (I can highlight the text but no window appears, like it used to).
Dear @amelia, last week I was not able to do much coding while being exhausted from sitting at the state exams committees. (Somehow I though it would be much easier, and I will be more fit for coding.) Therefore, I would like to code this whole week, mainly on Thursday and Friday (2nd and 3rd July) when I have time and my daughter is absent (she will be at her grandma’s place) which leaves more mental and time capacities for the work. Would it be OK to postpone the deadline a bit (two days)?
Not at all. Just log out of Edgeryders, when you log in again your account syncs to the new photo you uploaded on communities. It’s a necessary evil to have single sign-on for all communities in the Edgeryders galaxy.
It seems everyone is running a bit behind, so let’s say that coding needs to be finished by the end of the day on the 6th. That gives us two full days to go through each other’s codebooks before we meet.
There is no purpose in us meeting if we have not reviewed each other’s codebooks, so please give an update on the 6th if this is not looking feasible for anyone and we will go from there. If this ends up being the case, let us know sooner rather than later so we can push back.
@amelia@Jirka_Kocian@matthias@SZdenek@Wojt@Richard Dear All, as I wrote to Amelia earlier, Wojtek and I had a really great “workshop” on Friday (June 19) to develop our method of work and code a bit. We have come up with three questions:
The mother-child code relationship. Say, we code “homosexuality” and it intersects in the coded fragment with the issue of “various approaches”. Wojtek codes separately assuming that if we want to get the intersection the software will catch it and display. I code: mother: “homosexuality” and child: “homosexuality: various approaches.” What is your advice?
Wojtek observed that if, say, he codes the whole entry with CODE1 and then codes a part of it with CODE2 and then wants to adde CODE3, say, to a word, he cannot do this. The system allows only two codes “on one bit of text”, it seems.
The most urgent issue: is it possible to duplicate a threat of a conversation, so we could code it on the platform separately (also inter-coder reliability) and only then to compare our codes and reconcile them? It is - we believe - a very useful exercise, at least the beginning, to compare and try to synchronize our coding “habits.”
If this is just an exercise, you can copy/paste the content and create a new thread of your own as a “test”. I’d recommend @Jan being the test subject, since he assigns less codes, so it’ll be easier to transpose them onto the original thread if you want to merge them. Does this work for you?
Does @Wojt create a hierarchy in the backend, or just co-code? If the latter, that’s a good approach that would ideally be combined with yours as well. Yours works, but only if you assign parent-child codes that makes sense from an SSNA point of view. First, the top-level code will not auto-assign to the ones below it. @hugi and our team on a different project tried having this happen automatically, but it lead to a giant overproliferation of codes that rendered the SSNA meaningless. Second, “various approaches” is too vague on its own (to be honest, I don’t think the code “homosexuality:various approaches” is very descriptive either, so ideally the “lower level” code would be a more specific thing (e.g. “lesbian relationships”).
The plan (as articulated in this post, which you should both read carefully) with hierarchies is as follows:
So, in short – apply both top-level code and lower-level code if it applies, but be discerning. Use hierarchies in your own codebook, and we will then apply them together in the backend and use them to refine codes and apply top-level codes more widely if we need to – it’s very easy using the “copy” function in the backend to apply a top-level code to all instances of a lower-level code, but doing so automatically leads to too much vagueness/heavy co-occurrences on too high-level codes. If we do so more deliberately, in tandem with the SSNA creation, we get a more refined and accurate picture of the data. (as I describe this, @alberto, this might be a methodological point for us to note).
Just right click outside of the selection and you’ll be able to add more codes than 2 (we’ve discussed this on multiple occasions in the POPREBEL team and I go over it in training, but perhaps we need a more centralised documentation to refresh memories as it’s a lot of information to keep track of).
I have a call with @Wojt on Wednesday or Thursday (time pending) that if you can also join, would be useful to have you.
@wojt, so we pick a time more amenable to @Jan, should we say 9am EST, 2pm UK, 3PM Poland? I prefer Thursday but if Wednesday works better for @jan, I can make that work.
@amelia I’m fine with either Wednesday or Thursday, time of your choosing.
As to “various approaches” and “homosexuality: various approaches” we were referring to our codebooks only. Neither I or @Jan build hierarchies in the backend.
The question as I saw it, was more about how to highlight the relationships between various themes/codes/labels so that the system (which is at least partly automated as far as I understand, I mean the generation of the network and the graph) can see not only co-occurences, but also meaningful relationships between various codes.
This particular example pertained to one respondent noting that people exhibit various attitudes towards homosexuality,and now I’m wondering if it’s worth coding at all…
But let’s take a different, perhaps better example: which is better in the codebook and in the codes on the platform: the code “discrimination” (with “homosexuality” as its parent code in the codebook - a choice that, to my mind, would look better on the graph) or “homosexuality: discrimination”, provided that they pertain to the same fragments within the same single post? In our codebooks it probably doesn’t matter that much, since if we take care to somehow show the hierarchical structure it should be fine to later reflect that in the backend. Am I correct?
Great news!
As per the layers of coding, that is great news again! I probably won’t use it much myself, but may come in handy.
I am no ethnographer, but would argue that neither solution makes the most of our data model.
1 . Beware false hierarchies. Discrimination is definitely not a child of homosexuality. Hierarchies are meant in a proper ontological sense: cat is a child of mammal, and France is a child of Europe.
2. Double codes are bad practice. homosexuality:discrimination destroys the information that two separate experiences are mentioned in the same post. In SSNA, you are supposed to enter two separate codes, homosexuality and discrimination. The connection between the two is meant to be emergent: if (and only if) many posts mention both experiences, the semantic graph will show a strong connection. Formally, connections between experiences or concepts are represented by edges, not collapsed into nodes.
The advantage of coding thus is large. Somewhere else in the conversation you could have discrimination associated to something else, say age. The ego network of discrimination will then show you the various aspects of discrimination in the corpus. With double coding, you have to fall back on human memory to rebuild it. “Wait, did I not see discrimination elsewhere?” With large corpora and several people coding, this problem becomes more severe. SSNA’s main advantage is scalability, so it is essential to code for that. Your codes are no longer a memory aid for you, but a memory aid for the collective effort of several researchers plus a computer system.
