5. Organizing your data

Contents

• Crow example
• Video presentation

After you have collected your data, an essential step is to organize it in a consistent way for you to locate the data easily and that aligns with categories that you are interested in (e.g., organizing by assignment and/or draft). While collecting and organizing the data, consider taking a closer look at your data for any anomalies and multiple versions (e.g., drafts) in your decision-making process.

Crow example

The data in Crow is collected on a semester basis from different classes, taught by different instructors. Each class has multiple assignments with several drafts. Thus, our folder structure includes a semester level and year, course, instructor, assignment and draft.

• Semester Year
  • Original
    • Course number
      • Instructor code
        • Assignment code + draft code
        • Assignment code + draft code
      • Instructor code
    • Course number

Note that within the semester level, we have a folder with original students’ files in either PDF or Word format that we collect from instructors.

To see a more concrete example of the folder structure, here’s an example from the CIABATTA demo data that we have provided:

where

• fall 1993 is semester and year
  • original is the folder with the original files in PDF or Word (e.g. downloaded from D2L)
    • 101 is course number
      • Futrell is the instructor’s name
        • LND1 is a combination code for Literacy Narrative (LN) and draft 1 (D1)
        • LNDF is a combination code for Literacy Narrative (LN) and final draft (DF)
        • PRD1 is a combination code for Portfolio Reflection (PR) and draft 1 (D1)
        • PRDF is a combination code for Portfolio Reflection (PR) and final draft (DF)
    • 102 is course number

Each of these folders will contain multiple assignments in their original format (e.g., Word, PDF). We show five Word files for the LND1 folder here.

Video presentation

A video version of this content is available on the Crow YouTube channel.

Video: Organizing your data

Navigating CIABATTA

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