Wow! Last night, I left class feeling completely drained: emotionally, physically, you name it. I do not believe I could have been more tired if I had run a marathon. With that said, however, it was a good state of exhaustion to find myself in. I left class feeling quite satisfied and excited about the prospect of utilizing Atlas.ti in my research. Considering the long hours and money spent simply making a virtual world on my Mac with which I could even access Atlas.ti, this makes me breath a huge sigh of relief. So far, I have been able to operate all the Atlas operations we covered in class with no glitches! Hip, hip, hooray! Now, the true test will be remembering how to use all those various operations when I'm sitting home alone working and not in class with others. I know that mastering Atlas.ti is going to involve a very steep learning curve for me, and it will take quite a bit of time, but I'm determined to give it my best shot.
With that said, I am planning to focus on Mendeley and Atlas.ti for my skill building activities. I will continue building my Mendeley library and exploring the various functions and capabilities of the program. Using Atlas.ti, I want to use my recordings and transcripts from the Discourse Analysis course last fall and practice coding them. I'm nervous about this because I know we have a very short amount of time left before the class ends, but learning about Atlas.ti was one of the primary reasons I wanted to take this class, so I feel like I have to devote what little time I have left to figuring it out. My finished products may not be as polished or as rigorous as I would normally hope for, but I at least want to walk away with a good working knowledge of the two tools and the confidence to proceed with each of them as I continue my work beyond this class.
Just focus on practicing the key aspects of Atlas (so happy to hear that it worked well with your Mac!) - entering primary documents and commenting on them, creating some memos, creating quotations and codes and code families, and network views. Those are the key functions. you can do it!
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