The week thus far has been spent collating my fieldwork results and testing the categories I developed in my first fieldwork session back in Spring. The material culture in and of the stone tents contrasts interestingly with that in the active training contexts of the live firing area.
I am trying to use a grounded theory approach to conceptualise the development of my functional categories – this approach is used much more in sociology and social sciences but has an application here as my categories are developing from qualitative data such as conditions reports and my own observations.
At the moment however it is mostly about writing lists. Many, many lists of cross-referenced categories, comparing like with like and different with different, to see which categories and properties emerge.
Squidscapes 
August 18, 2016 at 7:29 pm
Funny, this is the second time this week that ‘grounded theory’ comes by, not having hear of it before, EVER… interesting!!! When will you share youre categories with us? I’m pretty curious about that too.
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August 18, 2016 at 7:30 pm
sigh…my spelling processor is off again…
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August 19, 2016 at 9:00 am
I’m still sorting them out! I’ve been going over them since my first fieldwork in April and it’s really hard to stop them sprawling out of control. It’s not quite the same as grounded theory coding is applied in social sciences (after all I am making the categories up from my own observations rather than gleaning them from interviews with soldiers etc — but I will also be coding categories from secondary sources like archaeological conditions monitoring reports. My supervisor suggested the approach because I was just blithely categorising things and he suggested I have some actual theoretical literature to back up the approach. It’s been helpful but taken a lot of reading to understand and I am still adapting the approach. Luckily constantly reassessing things is a big part of the methodology!).
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