Sumana Harihareswara let me document her awesomeness (the creation of a keynote for Open Source Bridge) for a mini-research project for a qualitative methods class. The keynote is titled "Be Bold, " hence this mini-research project's name: "Meta Be Bold."

This document is my first research journal (1 out of 2) and contains raw data (with Sumana's consent) along with brief informal memos on that data. You can also view the etherpad document mentioned in the journal directly online -- it now includes comments from my research group from class (as of this writing on June 6, 2012) which are not annotated and may not be coherent. Still, if you're curious what graduate school looks like behind the scenes, it might be interesting to poke around. Feel free to ask questions in the comments; I'll answer them all.

It's not meant to be polished, there are plenty of holes and gaps, etc; this was done for a summer class, so I only had a few days during which to do the work. Also, this was a research methods class, so the point was to get through the exercise of collecting and analyzing data, not to linger and do it perfectly.  I'm still struggling with the tension between the FOSS culture of release-early-release-often and the high degree of polish most academic writing is expected to have, and you'll likely hear that in my writing.

All right. Enough prefaces and disclaimers. Here you go.

Meta Be Bold - research journal 1

Over the next 10 hours, I'll be doing a lot of cleanup and more posts on this blog; the aggregation of those posts will then serve as my second research journal (due tomorrow morning, so I've got to hustle). I will endeavour to do a wrap-up posting at the end that will serve as a guide and index to everything, so if you're pressed for time but interested in this, wait 'till the final post, which should come before 9am EST on Thursday, June 7, 2012.