3 Things I Learned in Grad School - November 14

This should have been last Friday but I was both depressed and travelling. I do think these 3 things are pretty incredible though.
 
Inductive and Deductive Logic and how it relates to Coding
Top down, bottom up. Last week we discussed these ideas and how they apply to research and my research in general. Here’s the basis of the dichotomy: “Deductive reasoning starts with a general theory, statement, or hypothesis and then works its way down to a conclusion based on evidence. Inductive reasoning starts with a small observation or question and works it's way to a theory by examining the related issues”
 
How this relates to coding is pretty interesting and I can totally see myself using this. Coding is the idea of generalizing something into an arbitrary topic you choose. For example, if you see a stack of photos and find one with birds that photo might be coded as “nature,” “avians,” or “wings” depending on what you’re looking for.  This is helpful for pulling meaning out of data and being able to make sense of the narrative of a stack of otherwise chaotic documents.
 
Deductive coding is the idea of having your codes already figured out. For a variety of reasons you might need to see only photos of birds, photos of mammals, or photos of fish so your codes become birds, mammals, and fish. Inductive coding is allowing your documents to give you your codes. You go through your data and find how the data lump themselves into different codes.
 
Phenomenology/ Phenomenography
In a related way Phenomenology and Phenomenography deal with the subjective and objective respectively as well. I learned philosophy in my undergrad and it has surprisingly helped shape my paradigm, my weltanschauung. ever since. I regularly put new information in boxes of epistemology, ontology, existentialism, critical theory, and phenomenology to name a few so that I can understand what I am experiencing. I didn’t realize this was a type of phenomenography.
 
Phenomenology is basically understanding a phenomenon. Not a phenomenon in the sense of the dramatic or otherworldy but in the basic sense of an event or situation. Why is the sky blue or why does the sun return every morning are great examples of phenomenology. You can explain them through myths or through science.
 
Phenomenography on the other hand is how an individual experiences an event or situation. How you experience the sky being blue may be different than how your best friend experiences it. This is a helpful construct when thinking about conservation and developing a rigorous methodology around understanding how people interact with conservation aspects can help me get to understanding behavior motivations.
 
Practical Nostalgia
This is a slippery idea that I don’t fully comprehend yet but I think it has significant explanatory power for a lot of regressive actions. I learned it last week as creating a template for how things should be in the future based upon a perceived concept of how things were in the past. Phillip Moore defines it a bit differently: “The argument developed here is that nostalgia can be more than just a longing or a yearning for an unattainable golden era located some unspecified time in the past, when social life was well organised and clearly understood, but rather that nostalgia can also take on a tough critical edge when its practical uses are recognised and exploited. Couched as practical nostalgia, such interpretations of the past provide a vision that can be used as a way of creating a space for the development of a critique of the present and opening up possibilities for the future.”
 
To me, these seem contradictory. I will explore further…