This week my main endeavor has been learning to use the tools of the Internet for research purposes, something I thought I was well versed in. I have quickly learned that I was mistaken. There are so many research programs available that I had never heard of, much less used, so this week was dedicated to getting a crash course in all of them. I’m now at least able to work Nvivo as well as getting a start at using Zotero, which is a big accomplishment for me. I was really nervous about using the Nvivo program because the word everyone used to describe what you had to do was ‘coding’. I was envisioning hour after painful hour spent learning coding languages that I’ve heard of for years and always thought of as horrific and intensely difficult. Turns out, coding just means you go through your chosen text and sort quotes into the sections that you’ll later need for your research. Pretty simple, if fairly time consuming and tedious. I’m nearly done with doing this quote sorting for Pride and Prejudice now, and by Monday I should be done, which is super exciting because that means I can start doing the fun stuff, like graphs and charts. As an English major, you’re trained to be painfully detailed oriented. Close reading sometimes isn’t even the right word. Sometimes you’re coming at every passage with a magnifying glass, questioning the aesthetic and emotional value of every syllable. This distance reading, reading through technology and data points, is uncharted territory for me. Looking at literature like this is something that I have no experience in, which makes me all the more enthusiastic to get started.