Seven Ways of Looking at a Data Set

Abstract

A literary theorist, a biologist, an historian, a writing studies scholar, and a poet walk into a wine bar. The poet says, “I’ve got a stack of 1,223 handwritten questionnaire responses here in my bag; would you like to have a look?” The others reply, “Sure. Let’s see what we can learn here.” Descending from their respective disciplinary perches, they all gather around a table and start sifting through the questionnaires, which chronicle the writing background, habits, and emotions of PhD students and faculty in 15 countries. In this single corpus of data, each researcher sees something different, and from the other researchers’ responses, each learns new ways of seeing. What counts as an appropriate data analysis? What, for that matter, counts as data? We invite you to grab a drink and join our conversation.

Carbon Accounting in the Digital Industry: The Need to Move towards Decision Making in Uncertainty

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ReHumanizing Hospital Satisfaction Data: Text Analysis, the Lifeworld, and Contesting Stakeholders’ Beliefs in Evidence

“…While content analysis yielded much more meaningful results than text mining for daysurgery feedback across the board, the anthropologist still had reservations as to whether it was providing accurate or useful results for leaders to act upon. Satisfaction comments can relay elements of what an individual liked or didn't like about a service or experience yet meaning and emotions play a key role in the contextual analysis of that experience (Sword et al 2017).…”