It’s time for some PhD chat.
Yes, I am still working away on my PhD and still really enjoying it. I know there will undoubtedly be a period of stress ahead, but for now I’m delighted to be finding the experience such a positive one. I think as I’m working on subject areas that I love, and analysing content that gave me so much joy, (and emotional trauma, but more of that in the PhD) it is helping make the journey empowering thus far. I have such a strong connection with what I am trying to achieve and that’s why I wanted to do this PhD, I want to understand more about my work, and the impact my films and my filmmaking might have had beyond broadcast.
Anyway, I think the last update I posted was quite some time ago, after I submitted the literature review chapter I had written, following a mountain of reading of course. Once I received the comments on the literature review back from my wonderful supervisors I made some amendments based on their brilliant advice and insightful feedback and resubmitted.
Since then, I’ve been working hard on not just analysing my ‘data’ but on finding the best way to do it. I’m really fortunate to be in the position when I have all my material already gathered. Given I am drawing on the core themes of gender, class and emotion, as well as sports documentary filmmaking (from an autoethnographic perspective) in four of my existing films I haven’t had to go out (unlike the majority of PhD students) and do new research.
For the last while then, I’ve been focussing on coding all the interviews from the four films, categorising the text into the areas of my core themes. There are 78 interviews in total so this was quite the task. I did a run through on the paper transcripts first, which gave me an opportunity to highlight areas of interest that I could add in columns in the excel spreadsheet which is my coding queen. I initially planned to do all this in Nvivo but to be honest, for a creative, who focuses on storytelling, it felt too emotionally distant to me as a programme maker. My wee excel is doing the job just fine.
Anyway, after focussing on the paper edits to familiarise myself with the content again, and begin to create the topics of analysis that will fit into my core themes, I then viewed the interviews along with the transcripts, making notes about myself, the environment, the contributors and of course my core themes as I went along.
After viewing, and allocating topics and themes on ‘comments’ on the transcripts as well as taking a mountain of notes in my notebooks I went through them all again, reading the ‘comments’ and my notes and adding additional columns to my excel matrix. Then I went through every interview and ticked all the columns that applied to each interviewee. After that task I then colour coded all the columns, creating multiple coloured columns that are aligned to my key themes. I coloured these codes in the same colours I have coded my literature reading notes so it’s easy at a glance to, for example, refer to all the articles / books I have read around, say, gender, and then align this to all the interviews where gender has been a strong theme.
Then…no, I’m no finished yet! I coloured coded all the notes I made in my production notebooks for each film, colour coded all the edit notes I made in my digital editing programme Kollaborate (this is a shared edit space between myself and my editor where I have made ‘on frame’ comments during each stage of the film edits) and then I watched all the films again from a fresh perspective, making notes about my editing and storytelling decisions.
Finally, I wrote my methodology chapter and submitted it to my supervisors.
My next stage plan is to spend another week or so refreshing my reading in case I’ve missed any new and important literature in my areas of research, and then crack on with writing the research led chapters of the PhD.
All in all, with life constantly getting in the way, I’m really pleased with my first year progress. I think I’m in a good place eight months into the PhD. I’ve had really good support from my supervisors and I think that helps enormously. For now, then, I’m excited to get writing.
I hope your studies are going well too.
Margot McCuaig 