The Coding Portal: Self-Consciousness, Expertise, and the Pedagogy of Immersion.

Our contribution to this thematic issue, focused on the social construction of expertise, examines the coding of qualitative data, specifically, fieldnotes. Coding is central to the process of doing inductive fieldwork. It generates the categories fieldworkers use to focus mid- and late-inning research strategies, develop analysis, and write ethnographies – coding is a central pivot upon which fieldwork turns. Coding is not obviously “personal” or interesting as an experience, and yet, the act of coding, at least in the immersive pedagogical circumstances we observed, can occasion responses indicative of intrapersonal struggle: provoking a set of emotional and cognitive responses. We find this particularly interesting in the context of the fully self-conscious fieldwork that Emerson et al. (1995, 2011) platformed as ethnography’s staging area in Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, and instructive in the broader sense of what expertise now invites. Rather than dismiss these “struggles with coding” as unworthy of serious consideration, because students will eventually develop fieldworker competence, we view these challenges as representing a key, self-reflexive dimension of fieldwork that highlights what ultimately gets “baked” into sociological expertise. This article discusses the authors’ reflections on how student ethnographers reacted to the coding experience during an immersive course, in the hopes of encouraging fuller accounts by sociological ethnographers of what can be awakened when we – students and sociologists – code our fieldnotes, and to encourage greater appreciation for coding as a form of qualitative expertise. Specifically, we advance two points having to do with a sociology of expertise: (1) that the coding of ethnographic fieldnotes is a genuine, though undervalued, type of expertise, entailing the development of craft-like skills that include not just interpretive finesse but also the ability to engage moments of self-reckoning; and (2) that such expertise can be developed via a pedagogy of immersion under the guidance of supportive practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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