The coding of interview data has begun!
I'm beginning this part of the research process with the interviews I conducted in the first half of this year at a number of jazz archives -- National Jazz Archive (UK), South Australian Jazz Archive, SwissJazzOrama and Nederlands Jazz Archief -- as I am working towards a conference paper to be presented in November on the affective atmospheres of these places (more on that later). Playing around with the various 'query tools' in Nvivo 10 (the qualitative data analysis computer software I am using in this project) I created the following "tag cloud" based on interviews at those four archives.
This "cloud" provides a nice visualisation of word frequency in the interview data (for words 6 letters and more), and hints at some of the key concerns of the project more generally. It is fitting that 'people' is the most prominent word here, and 'together' gets a look in too. These are places (archives) where interested people (volunteers) get together to collect material (magazines, recordings etc) with very little funding (a problem!). And doing-it-together involves talking and laughter --- the cloud points to the social dimensions of these institutions.
It will be interesting to see how the cloud develops as more interviews get coded, and how the data from archives that collect musics other than jazz shifts the emphasis or weighting of words (if at all).
