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Love the metaphor, Birrell, backhoes and camelhair brushes are henceforth in the methodological glossary! To Doug's point, I absolutely agree: we have to be able to see data always in context. (John's right, we all I think agree there.) But what's the relevant context? Don't we have to be able to see in many contexts and out of context too? (It's what I was getting at in my "Closeness to data" paper in QHR last year - closeness can mean many things and some, particularly immediate access to coded chunks, make the distancing that theorizing requires very difficult.) So we need computer retrievals to offer us immediate recontextualizing in several ways - show the (relevant) context, code it, go back to the whole document, go elsewhere to understand... Character based text search, for example, gives you zero context unless you specify a context; so you can do a pincer search in finest possible context or a real backhoe job, and things move in different ways depending on which you did. And Birrell's crucial point is that backhoes themselves crudely recontextualize! Just seeing all this different material together helps you re-see it. Strauss taught me that re-seeing is sometimes half the battle - and then, the other half is not clinging to the original context. (btw Birrell, I always thought till today of the scoop searches in terms of drag net fishing. Bad for the fishing fields, just because you get so much that you weren't aiming to get. But you do get a lot of fish, and you find out a lot about other critters out there too. So long as you don't think you can catch river trout that way...) cheers Lyn Lyn Richards, Research Professor of Qualitative Methodology, University of Western Sydney, Director, Research Services, Qualitative Solutions and Research. (email) [log in to unmask] (Ph) +61 3 9459 1699 (Fax) +61 3 9459 0435 (snail) Box 171, La Trobe University PO, Vic 3083, Australia. http://www.qsr.com.au %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%