I'm immersing myself in the coding of the qualitative data from our grant research, which means blogging will be light or non-existent for a week or two.
For those interested in the gritty details, I've got ~30 transcripts from the fall interviews, and ~30 email interviews from winter quarter, all of which need to be coded and analyzed for patterns. (There are spring interviews going on now, but that analysis can wait 'til next month when we have all the transcripts.)
I'm coding them using NVivo from QSR, which has a lot of nice features, but is far from ideal. This summer, I'll also try doing some of the coding using TAMS, an open source package running under OS X.
Once the analysis is done, we'll spend the summer developing the survey instrument that will be administered at 80+ institutions in the US offering BS degrees in IT.
So I'm feeling a little stressed at the moment. Happily, I wrote an entire chapter in my dissertation (292K PDF) on exactly this process--facing a stack of qualitative data and feeling overwhelmed--which has been extremely helpful in managing my panic attacks this time around.
So, between gardening, enjoying the lilacs that are starting to bloom (Rochester's famous for them), and coding the data, I'm not expecting to have much time left for blogging, at least in the short term.
