Visualising data, nodes, and themes in NVivo

After transcribing and coding a lot of interviews on NVivo 10, I ended up with a ton of 'nodes', which I think of quite simply as themes I've found in different pieces of texts from different sources. Linking them together means the nodes are a good place to start to gather material from different sources that point in the same direction. Quotes from individuals and segment from policy documents can be gathered together under them. 

But I ended up with a lot - and it remains to be see whether there were too many. But I did code all my data, and I doubt that all of these could be squeezed into my thesis. The question then became: how do I deal with all these nodes that are linked. So I borrowed my office mate Holly's book 'Qualitative Data Analysis with Nvivo' and went to the visualisation section which gives a brief run through of how to do a simple version of what I set out below.

This post demonstrates how I turned my nodes into a relational map.

That is, how I went from this:

 To this:

You'll need to have a few nodes - but you can also do this with sources, if you're trying to find less thematic links or map things out.

STEP BY STEP GUIDE

(1) On the left column, selectied the Models tab and right click in the large right hand field to set up a 'New Model'. The below textbox appears. Give it a name. I called mine 'Tester'.

(2) Next, you'll need to populate the large grid that appears when you open your new model. On the top menu bar, you should have the choice to 'Add Project Items' if you've activated the Model tab (as per the below picture). Select your nodes, or some sources. Or a mixture of a few. The purpose of this is to visualise the relationship between different things. This can be between different 'kinds' of items.

(3) Below is what appeared when I selected some items (files sourced from the parliamentary Hansard, some minutes from All Party Parliamentary groups, a PDF or two and a couple of nodes). You can see the different elements by the symbols appearing with the name on the item's shape. The little blue ball items are nodes. 

Although the shapes of different 'kinds' of items are different to begin with, you can change them as the next step explains.

 (4)

Right-clicking the item will allow you to change its shape (double clicking it will also allow you to change the colour, which groups nodes in the model and, as per the rightmost field, allows you to 'hide' grouped items, but I've not shown this here).

Changing the shame of these items can be useful. I used circles for little nodes (perhaps a common idea, or an item people talked about a lot), diamonds for bigger issues, and rounded rectangles for big themes that I imagined would be 'hubs' for circles and diamonds.

(5) Now you can start to play around with relationships by drawing arrows between different nodes. By doing it in NVivo, the modeller allows the connection between different items to be moved about the page to follow the individual items as you drag their physical position on the page with your mouse:

 

Some of these relationships might move from one to the other, there might be symmetrical relationship, or it could be purely associative. The upper tool bar model tab accomodates for all of these, as the above image demonstrates.

Once you've spent a bit of time on this, you'll end up with a flat map that can help you to 'see' the relationships between what was just a list of different nodes or sources, as below:

Whilst the map is still 'messy' and full of information, what it has been able to do is allow me to think visually about the clustering of different ideas that I've been coming across over a period of weeks. It's helped me to think about the thesis outline, and how I can incorportate the various data (embedded in all of those nodes) physically into a document.

Topologies of Immunity, University of Exeter, April 10th 2014

Last week's fantastic 'Topologies of Immunity' workshop at the University of Exeter began with a keynote from Warwick Anderson (whose new 2014 paper is here, and absolutely worth a read for anybody interested in discussions of globalisation, biovalue and postcoloniality. Anderson's a self-termed 'postcolonial bore', but the paper is anything but boring). His keynote, Getting Ahead of One’s Self, discussed the last part of his new book Intolerant Bodies – A short history of autoimmunity. Co-authored with Ian McKay, the book offers a reflection on the cultural relevance of immunity. As in the book, Anderson's talk argued for a more generous understanding of immunitary logic, inclusive of philosophical and cultural reflections of immunology.

The keynote was held in Building:One's Bateman Lecture Theatre

The talk was a perfect ramp into a lively afternoon of discussion. Chaired by Professor Gail Davies, the workshop began with a lively paper from Jamie Lorimer and Richard Grenyer, that explored methodological issues in how to conceptualise and measure the 'micriobiogeographies' of the biomes we live in. Nadine Levin offered some important thoughts on the normative assumptions of data-intensive scientific work at the intersection of metabolism and immunology ('good' bacteria, and the 'healthy' microbiome.) 

The workshop was also an opportunity for the first outing of a paper Nik Brown and I have put together on the internationalised immunitary regimes of public and private cord blood banking and transplant. Using Roberto Esposito's conceptual work around immunitas and communitas, the paper argues that the cord blood paradigm confounds our current understandings of national solidarism and pernicious, 'selfish' marketisation of human tissue. 

University of Exeter

Astrid Schrader's paper gave a fantastic overview of harmful algal blooms known as red tides, and scientific work done around understanding programmed cell death (the fantastic title of the paper was 'suicidal microbial communities'). The paper toyed with conceptions of the temporality of death, and how we come to understand cells as - paradoxically - committing 'suicide'.

Artist Helen Scalway explored the use of materials in her work. She also touched upon some of the challenges she's been confronted with in understanding, representing, uniting and separating parts, pieces, shapes and movements. Along with an opportunity to see some interesting art (something I never really encounter), the space for an 'artist response' was vital in illuminating the role of metaphor in this discussion. I mean this particularly in regards to the necessary transposition of ideas across vital, political, and material platforms (or topologies), when we discuss immunity.

Nigel Clark's closing remarks tied the event together nicely. Noting that we were all about to exit the room as the singular individuals we'd been on entry, he made it clear that our ideas of flow and globalisation, sharing and hybridity, make very little sense without an appreciation of locality, location and more-and-less material borders. Importantly, he also raised a matter that hadn't been made explicit in any of the papers during the day. Politically, the matters explored here are all very fecund. But what can we do with immunity? What doors are opened and closed by thinking about the world through this lens? The philosophy of immunity is, I think, going to be taking up much of my own conceptual energy for some time to come.