I recall the tutor suggesting a title for my Module One autoethnography that included the word ‘towards‘. I liked this since it emphasised that I was not yet at my destination and I have used it on a number of occasions since, with ‘contribution‘ being another preferred word when it comes to titles for my module assignment papers:
Module One: Understanding my journey as an online teacher: towards development of a professional identity.
Module Two: The contribution of online lurking practice to the pedagogical knowledgeability of part-time, external faculty members.
Module Five: Towards the development of global virtual project teams: consideration of the implications of whiteness in the Irish postgraduate classroom.
Module Three: Towards the development of responsible project managers: an examination of the reflective learning contribution.
Module Four: Bridging the age-based digital divide: an intergenerational exchange during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown period in Ireland.
Yep, looks like an emerging pattern here.
Having gone a bit off track (in the pursuit of reflexivity of course), the point I’m getting around to making is that this post is about the tools that will help me on my PhD pathway towards a literature review. I’m expecting that a literature review of 9,000 words or thereabouts involves a lot of effort so I want to be as efficient as possible in my reading, annotating, coding and writing. In a recent post I mentioned that I planned to use EndNote for my reading. After all, I had spent quite some time attaching the relevant PDFs to references there. I was able to read, highlight, add sticky notes that were date and time stamped, so that covered the reading and annotating steps. But then what? I expect to have to read a lot, a LOT, in order to write a 9,000 word literature review. So, how do I efficiently and productively locate my notes on book chapters and articles I have read? I don’t think EndNote is the answer.
Enter NVivo. Having attended a couple of workshops organised by my university I knew that NVivo had huge potential to organise the chaos of my note-taking, firstly by annotating sections of interesting text, then by coding. I also knew that I should not jump headfirst into coding since this will only exacerbate the chaos. Rather, using the workshop resources and Jackson & Bazeley’s chapter 8 on Literature Reviews and pdf Files by my side I am reading, highlighting and annotating, building up a notebook of annotations on each resource I read, but not coding at this point. When I am ready to start coding, my NVivo annotations will be a useful starting point. Dr. Anuja Cabraal has written a few blog posts on using NVivo for literature reviews and I recommend looking at her blog for helpful guidance starting with this post.
EndNote, NVivo and Scrivener, while it doesn’t feel like it at the moment, are key tools to support my task of reading for and writing a literature review. Note to self: just don’t go tidying up my desktop again and move the EndNote library – that was a mistake, or as Julia Roberts’ character, Vivian, in Pretty Woman said: “Big mistake. Big. Huge.” Just don’t go there.
Until next time, Sandra
Featured image courtesty of Bitmoji
Reference: Jackson, K. & Bazeley, P. (2019). Qualitative data analysis with Nvivo (Third ed.). London: Sage.
Sandra Flynn 
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