Ingredients collected

It seems as if I have a set of ingredients, the data I've collected from interviews, and a recipe book, the Miles & Huberman [1], but how I put them together is up to me, both in what I choose to do with the ingredients and how I mix them, so I come out with, not definitive results, but what I want to present, or rather, not necessarily what I want to present but what I'm able to present, depending on how I analyse and write.

I remember when I was little how I would have paints and paper, and want to represent a wonderful picture through my painting, but my paint would be too watery and I'd produce something horrid, not what I meant at all. I was disappointed because I couldn't show and share with other people what was in my mind.

So I must hone skills to use the tools and to communicate what I find.

Son's just been reading something from this week's New Scientist[2] on finding a mathematical proof after 7 years. Once a useful alternative view of the problem revealed a solution, it took days, hours to compress the proof to a few lines. Son said that he too could see this at his lower level of maths, where having realised the answer he wanted, he could say, "irrelevant, irrelevant, irrelevant" and strike out much, leaving the last succinct and correct two lines.

That's what I want to do too with this analysis - must be my mathematical background, but it's going through all the irrelevancies first before finding the points that you want and need.

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[1] Miles, Huberman, 1994. Qualitative Data Analysis: an expanded source book, 2nd edition, Sage
[2] New Scientist, Proof and Beauty, page 48, 21 July 2007