I’ve been provided the following prompts by Dr. Jenkins to help reflect on the current internship progress.

• What processes (writing processes, work processes) are you developing or learning about through your internship?

Current work and writing process focus on determining prevalent phrases and structures within annual reports the Commissioner of Education, ranging 1873- 1932, and recording them through highlighting and annotation. A central document listing all potential phrasal candidates is updated and a report containing the highlights and annotations, for the corresponding year, is uploaded to a Google Drive directory for archiving. There is little composition in this process but does require an understanding of the prose and genre to foresee potential keywords for queries to return promising results.

Additionally, I have been tasked to attempt a coding of a small sample set of documents (as the ATLAS TI limits to ten documents. MAXQDA has no limitation) from the corpus. The purpose is twofold: to determine the scope of the current coding schema as applied to the contexts deemed pertinent to the research at hand and audit the capabilities/features of ATLAS TI

• Are you drawing upon any prior experience to be successful at these processes?

The coding process is quite new to me, previous courses have had only cursory exploitation (save for Dr. Jenkins Research and Methodology’s course) regarding the inner working of corpus analysis. In auditing the capabilities if ATLAS TI and MAXQDA, and RQDA. I am pulling from experience working in the Information Technology field as a consultant for small-businesses; wherein I collected the information of deliverables required by the customer and created cost and capabilities report pertaining to a number of possible actions which fulfilled the set criteria. As such, a report be prepared to detail the difference in capabilities, costs, and recommended action; additionally, due to licensing constraints, I will need to create a report justifying the migration from ATLAS TI v.7 to v.8 and what the research gains through the additional costs and features provided by v.8

I’m drawing upon some previous work experience in excel to better organize the central excel document which I use to track my progress through highlighting and annotating phrasal candidates (phrasal candidates being sentences or paragraphs relevant to the interest scope of the project) – basic ‘IF ()’ ‘THEN ()’ statements and formulas are used to ease this process; additionally, previous personal experience in meddling with corpus analysis toolkits such as AntConc allowed me to generate better collocation lists however, there were no salient returns) which were exported to the central excel sheet for highlighting and annotation tracking. In the end, AntConc uses resulted as a means to query the corpus and create a list of possible contexts – rather than a method of quantitative analysis of language patterns. Which is fine, the results are still useful.