By way of introduction, much of the first half of my curriculum mapping internship with GIS has involved some data collection and a good bit of data transformation. The data transformation process involves creating a structure for what will become a visual tree, and transferring much of the data collected by various instruction librarians into Excel in such a way that it can be visualized. Seeing what these trees look like has helped structure some of the more complex academic departments.
The second half of the summer will largely be focused on using NVivo to do qualitative data analysis of syllabi. This is a project to which I am looking forward. I believe that NVivo will be a valuable software to learn. And qualitative research is the type of research I am most interested in performing during my library career. Some of the aspects of qualitative research I enjoy are: the group nature of the research, the inductive approach, the open ended aspects of the research, the more flexible nature of the research process, and the iterative approach, among others. I am looking forward to learning how NVivo works, and seeing what we will find in our qualitative analysis.