As the semester internship continues, I have been provided more prompts from Dr. Jenkins to assess my performance.

What skills or knowledge are you developing or learning about through your internship?

Currently, I am developing skills, experience, and knowledge in utilizing Qualitative Data Analysis software (QDA) suites, such as ATLAS TI and MAXQDA. I am becoming comfortable in assigning codes to particular contexts in order to construct a, hopefully, objective narrative pertaining to the focus of the research – this is all to determine the capabilities of these software suites in order to determine the best course of action of software selection to be used further on. This involves deep reading of the original text and considering the deeper structure and its contexts in order to determine whether it is relevant or not; additionally, drawing relations and trends of thought across texts.

Are you drawing upon any prior experience to help you learn these skills or this knowledge?

Current composition of documentation draws on prior experiences and courses – specifically, technical writing, professional writing, and Research methodologies. Documentation includes how the corpus data is structured – naming conventions, codes, contexts, sources, as well as how to access the data, commit additional data, and the current status of the corpus to aid in interns and researchers later who may access the data later – specifically, Dr. Stone; additionally, I am composing a memo which justifies a recommended course of action in selecting the appropriate QDA suite based on capabilities and cost.

How do you think you will use these skills or this knowledge in future situations? 

The skills within memo and documentation composition have direct application in other work and research environments. The QDA software interaction is more specific to areas of qualitative research; however, such practices and methodologies have application outside of academic research. For instance, one could draw trends between internal documents/ memos of an organization to see larger patterns in writing (say a nonprofit looking for trends in the writing successful grant applications). ATLAS TI and MAXQDA become very powerful tools to accomplish such tasks – their quantitative analysis components facilitate determining the saliency of patterns outside of professional inference.