NVivo Experimentation 2

For this week, I decided to use NVivo to put together my weekly example for my online Communication Criticism course. When I've taught the course in person, it has been easier to teach coding because I can just give everyone a paper copy of some kind of text, and they can code by hand. In the online environment, it's been harder to do this-- all of my visuals are either static images, blocks of text, or animated PowerPoints. I can't just explain coding and hope that they try it on their own.

This upcoming week, I'm teaching Narrative Criticism. By using NVivo, I can go ahead and code several texts by a single author, and when it comes time to create the example, I can use a screen capture program to show my students coding and some of the data outputs. I don't expect them to use NVivo themselves, but it's a more coherent way to show coding than trying to use a multi-color highlighting scheme in Word.

The project I created includes three stories by David Sedaris that have been broadcasted on This American Life. Following Sonja Foss's explanation of Narrative Criticism, I am going to code the texts for theme; I have chosen to focus on separation, loss, and lack. I have also run word frequency analyses and generated a few other outputs (I like making visuals).

The project file can be found here.