Digging into data: learning together from analysis experiences
At a long overdue lunch the other day, my friend Gili and I got to talking about coding and analysis. We are both on the same page: frustrated with the lack of guidance, in textbooks and the like, for how qualitative analysis actually works.
Turns out that she, like many of us who train students in qualitative methods, had made her own 2-page guide for how to do ‘analysis’.
I wonder how many of us have made these guides for our thesis supervisees, after tiring of explain over and over the uncertainty of this process. How it takes a bit of working through data to get a “feel” for it, and how you know a certain point when it will all work out. when the pieces all fit together. My version of this is a Covid-era recorded lecture that is part of my MA qualitative methods course, with my then-1-year-olds’s hands all over a puzzle.
The 2025 special section Digging into Data tries to put some of these types of practical advice on display, by peeking inside the process of generating analysis with qualitative data. Part of the ongoing Thinking with Method series in Area, we collected together the real-world, as it-happens experiences of geographers who get stuck, sidetracked, bogged down, or feel pressured to cut corners in doing analysis. Our authors consider how we live with our data after it expires, and how it means something that jumps out of a spreadsheet even as it fills each individual cell.
The format – short, reflective, but well grounded papers – and focus on the practicalities of qualitative work are hallmarks of this series of special sections. Starting from considering how geographers use the spoken word, then to what they put in their field notebooks, this third edition focuses on how that data gets processed. We are at work now on the next and final special section, ‘iteration and surprise’, looking at the entire research process and how the potential for the unexpected discovery can (and should?) be worked into how we approach qualitative research. The driving question in all of these collections is simple: how are geographers actually doing this work? By collecting together these few examples, we hope they can generate a version of Gili’s two-page manual, that help us think about our practices of doing research and talk about them with our colleagues and students.
To read further, go to: https://blog.geographydirections.com/2025/12/12/shining-a-light-digging-into-data-means-more-than-just-coding/.
Publication details: Wagner, L. (2025, December) Digging into data: learning together from analysis experiences. Geography Directions. https://doi.org/10.55203/UMHX4547