Scribbling is usually thought of as done carelessly and hurriedly. However, it can be a “warm-up” exercise, spontaneous writing to loosen up imagination and allow unconscious thoughts to arise naturally while reading; generating creativity, capturing ideas and insights in the moment. Throughout the study I made pencilled scribblings in margins and on post-it notes to inscribe impressions, questions, thoughts, feelings in relation to what percolated into consciousness while listening/reading/reviewing materials. I scribbled away during provocative/evocative conversations with PhD supervisors. I paid attention to things like
78 tropes and their effect on how I interpreted and understood participants’ ways of making meaning and their understanding of performance of subjectivity.
Scribbling, a process of free association, offered things from incomprehensibilities, scratchings later discarded to new ideas and insights informing research “doings”. It was a way to access fields of relations and cultural networks that emerged as I looked for themes and patterns in the data (Parker 2004, p. 310). They supported how to judge, process ideas, thoughts and insights, interpret relevancy of what I read/heard/saw in relation to my research questions and purpose. Scribbling in relation to self-memos provided a screening of texts, cultivated intuitive knowing of what texts offered or not as foundational to analysis and assigning meaning or meaning making, locating/recognising statements of discourse, the interconnectivities of statements within/across discourses.
Self-memos were self-reflections on data, insights, questions or comments arising throughout the research processes; thoughts on how and/or what data may be missing, how data could be collected differently or how to make sense of data. A back and forth rhythm between scribblings and self-memos was used to disrupt thinking, avoid seeing what is desired, to problematise my writing. Latimer’s (2003, p. 234) idea of getting inside the topic of concern with attention to detail, nuances of language, voice inflections, gestures; to question ‘what do we want to get inside’ to know and understand how nurses perform their identity, produce and reproduce their realities, their practice, their identity.
Transcription of field notes and interviews as textual products worked to generate ideas and insights, in particular by doing my own transcription. I felt closer to the data listening and reliving what I heard, gaining added perceptions of what was said by whom, when and how for a more fulsome set of textual products, to locate entangled discourses. I experimented with some recordings, not transcribing per se but re/listening over and over to pick up details and nuances generating more self-memos and textual products.
Textual practices were valuable in thinking through, re/organising my mind maps as visuals to establish interrelationships of ideas via various configurations to depict how data and analytic outcomes were interconnected. The study research questions were central to the map organised in relation to the purpose and processes of the study. I depicted
79 decline discourse disciplined bodies, scripted patienthood, constituted performances of identities and subjectivities, mediated the nurses’ conduct of care. Textual practices
mapped out languaging of care, wording as discourses, social practices of power/knowledge that implied, addressed and/or referred to functional decline in relation to observed and heard hospitalised older adults’ experiences. The power relations located in these textual spaces, the discursive formations and the operations of discourse power/knowledge effects could be viewed as a trialectic of space/power/knowledge.
I also made up charts, lists and grids to organise data to examine interconnectivities of ideas and insights, to gain new understanding of what the data offered. These textual practices organised how to define and cross reference ideas, concepts, philosophies and ways of knowing, to track where they were located, how used to do what and how
redistributed to make meaning of data. These charts contained ideas on problematisation, contingency, knowledge, truth, bio-power, bio-politics, objectification, subjectivity,
categorisation, norm, normativity, nursing, patient and more. They enabled locating and organising statements and events of discourse to see discursive theoretical and empirical concepts and how they are contingent on context and conditions of possibility.
Nurse researchers like Purkis (2003, p. 34) informed textual products by her way of questioning the divide or distinction between ‘nurses in practice and those who write about nursing practice’. Purkis (p. 35) argued theorised nursing practice may not be adequately conceptualising actual everyday nursing practice because nurses in practice although
accomplishing nursing as ‘knowledgeable actors’ may not be particularly adept at describing how they do nursing in terms of what they are accomplishing as nurses. She contended this lack of insight between theoretical (what nurses take to be their work) and empirical (what their actual work is) and how nurses accomplish their identity was problematic.
Textual practices aided identification of the work of discourses: the constitutive effects of labels, categories, stereotypes, endearments, resistance, beliefs, values, assumptions, exclamations, ironies, paradoxes, inconsistencies, allusions, rhetoric,
argumentation and power relations (cf. Parker 2004; Wodak & Meyer 2009). I could more readily recognise, locate, and organise signifiers of ageing, definitions, tropes, medical jargon, descriptions of functional capacities and functional status. Textual practices were also guided by questions suggested by Emerson, et al. (2011, p. 177):
80 What are people doing? What are they trying to accomplish?
How exactly do they do this? What specific means and/or strategies do they use?
How do members talk about, characterize, and understand what is going on? What assumptions are they making?
What do I see going on here? What did I learn from these notes? Why did I include them?
How is what is going on here similar to, or different from other incidents or events recorded elsewhere in the field notes?
I created these questions:
How does a bio/medical discourse draw us in?
Who has the right to speak biomedical discourse and be heard? What role do we have to adopt to hear the message of this discourse? How does this role reflect the power relations we have with the “author”
[where the text comes from] of the discourse?
These questions were also invaluable for generating ideas of what to look for in texts and how to create textual products for specific analytic purposes and helped inform when I had enough data.