Note-taking & Record Keeping BRACE (Building Research in Australasian Computing Education) First Workshop, Dunedin, January 2004

2 What are “notes”? Lab Book? Verbatim (interview) transcripts? Field notes? Diary? A log of design rationale? A place to explicate assumptions? Diagrammatic representations? Annotated bibliographies? Audit trails?

I: Do you see any relationship between that and programming? … skills … abilities? S: Yes. I can. I can see a relationship. Because the way I went about doing it was probably different to what … I would have thought about programming …. something to do because I mean … the way I think … well, I haven’t done much programming yet … but I think of things a bit more systematically than I did there because I naturally cut corners, I naturally, you know, open the phone book randomly. A computer won’t do that. A program … I mean you can make it do something randomly, but … I also had other, I knew that roughly half-way through would be where I was … or something. Whereas the computer doesn’t know that. So it has a specific example, so that’s a bit different to programming because, yeah, in a computer program it would know because it wouldn’t need to look it wouldn’t need to flick through things. It could go straight there. So.

4 Taking notes Intention record of fact? aide memoire? part of analysis? Practice On every sheet: your name identifier date (place? time?) page x (later page x of y ) duration? state of mind?

5 Not just notes … Photocopies of articles Print out of web-pages Print out of slides Photographs Audio tapes

6 What are the problems? What is the status of your notes? What are you going to use them for? Phenomenon -> Secondary evidence -> Primary evidence Unit of analysis Intermediate concepts

7 Unpicking vocabulary (reprise) Intermediate Concepts Intermediate concepts are intermediate in that they are between concepts (theories, theoretical principles, conceptual lenses) and empirical observations, materials, and data. An intermediate construct is not given at the beginning of research but rather is built from what researchers come to know in the field - how concepts “live”, how they are situated in multiple contexts. Intermediate concepts are means for reciprocally making sense of field research and making sense of concepts in relation to empirical research and theory-building … intermediate concept construction contributes to the basis for generalization from particularized qualitative case examples. Judith Gregory Activity Theory in a “Trading Zone” for Design Research and Practice (Doctoral Education in Design Conference, La Clusaz July 2000)

8 How will you organise them? What’s the indexing mechanism? Type? (interviews/diagrams/stats – other papers? – annotated bibliography?) Themes/subjects? Alphabetically/numerically? Chronologically? Knowledge bombs? How do you build new knowledge? Log books? 5x3 index cards?

9 Pirsig Unassimilated Program Crit Tough Junk

10 Which principle? Pose significant questions that can be answered empirically Link research to relevant theory Use methods that permit direct investigation of the question Provide a coherent and explicit chain of reasoning Replicate and generalize across studies Disclose research to encourage professional scrutiny and critique

11 Which principle? Pose significant questions that can be answered empirically Link research to relevant theory Use methods that permit direct investigation of the question Provide a coherent and explicit chain of reasoning Replicate and generalize across studies Disclose research to encourage professional scrutiny and critique