in this world, beauty is so common

"A lucky line here and there should not make us think any higher of ourselves, for such lines are the gift of Chance or the Spirit; only the errors are our own. I hope the reader may find in my pages something that merits being remembered; in this world, beauty is so common"

-Jorge Luis Borges, Foreward to "In Praise of Darkness", 1969

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I am heading to Bulgaria tomorrow for a conference. I was compiling some notes on my methodology and I cam across a particularly poetic part for a research method paper. The first quote is a blip about my method; the second is something sweet to savor--the sort of thing I strive for in my work, a bit of reality a bit of contextualized, informed, historical contesting guessing, and a bit of documentation.

 “Thematic analysis is a method for identifying, analyzing and reporting patterns (themes) within data. It minimally organizes and describes your data set in (rich) detail. However, frequently it goes further than this and interprets various aspects of the research topic”  

“Thematic analysis can be an essentialist or realist method, which reports experiences, meanings and the reality of participants, or it can be a constructionist method, which examines the ways in which events, realities, meanings, experiences and so on are the effects of a range of discourses operating within society. It can also be a contextualized method, sitting between the two poles of essentialism and constructionist, and characterized by theories such as critical realism, which acknowledge the ways individuals make meaning of their experience, and, in turn, the ways the broader social context impinges on those meanings, while retaining focus on the material and other limits of ‘reality.'" 

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 I posted a bundle of photos to FB today. You can view them here: PHOTOS... there are photos from around my Bday, a trip to Venice, a trip to Osijek, and a trip to Ljubljana.

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The spell check on my computer is never working anymore. It ALWAYS thinks in Croatian. What is a girl supposed to do?

See you when I'm back. 

emily