1. Index it!
   1. This is not mysterious: most scholarly books include an index (e.g., from Glaser and Strauss)
2. Indeed anyone working with fieldnotes and other material collected through participant-observation, interviewing, video, etc., must start with an index designed for retrieval.

They are best developed as the field work proceeds and before the corpus is too large.

an exercise: Given a research topic about race or gender in American politics, generate five to ten items to index from a the first four paragraphs of a report from the New York Times about Ben Carson (October 26, 2015)

1. Note that what I call "indexing" other call "coding" or "categorizing."  In some instances the words can be taken to be mostly synonymous.  Each however carry a possibly quite different theoretical load that should be clarified:
   1. a category
      1. properly refers to a particular approach to ethnography or qualitative research that accepts the usefulness of starting with definitions that may be useful for comparative purposes.  They may be derived:
         1. from a local politico-ideological common sense (generally Euro-American), for example:
            1. sex (as either/or)
            2. age (as number)
            3. marital status (as defined by State authorities)
         2. from theory (sometimes overlapping with or rooted in local common sense), for example:
            1. kinship
            2. religion
            3. ideology
      2. most properly, if we accept the altogether power argument associated with what Glaser and Strauss called "grounded theory," a "category" is a finding. For example:
         1. "social loss"
      3. it may also appear following the development of the local politico-ideological common sense, for example:

         There are still very few studies segmenting a population by gender category except in a euphemistic way (i.e. only two "genders" are considered)

         1. gender as a possibly indefinite set of labels (L, G, B, T, Q, A ... HM? HF?)
   2. a code properly refers to way of organizing observations based on an pre-observational (deductive) understanding of the phenomenon under study (or perhaps the result of an earlier ethnographic research that "grounded" the decision to focus on the particular behavior).  Coding belongs to the world of experimental research with the serious attendant issues of intercoder reliability. 
      1. for example:
         1. teaching
         2. interruption
         3. joking
2. Categorizing and coding are not inherent part of ethnography: many ethnographers never categorize or code. But all, in one way or another, index what they collect (though they rarely report on it). 

An index entry is pre-theoretical in the sense that it is not designed to be used by anyone but this particular analyst.  It is not intended to be used by anyone else, and, above all, it is not intended to be made public (and thus justified, defended, etc.).

1. for example:
   1. female teacher grooming herself in front of students
   2. Last name, first name
   3. "Harlem is not for sale!"

Some students I know have used one of these programs with some success.

1. Ethnograph by Qualis Research
2. NVivo (available for free from Teachers College for students)
3. It is also possible to use Excel to achieve some of the basic functionality of these programs. It might also be possible to use HTML as I am doing as an experiment in these pages.
4. Each of these have been found useful by some students I know. They are all controversial:
   1. as it is evident in a conversation (September 2003) among some of the top ethnographers of education. In this conversation many fundamental points are made about coding, premature closure and other essential issues. As mentioned in my own contribution to this discussion, indexing one's corpus--however minimally--must occur. This does remain a task that must, theoretically, be done pre-theoretically.
   2. check another conversation (September 2014) among some of my students.

1. A person index
2. A subject index

1. An example from my fieldwork in Ireland, using HTML:
   1. general subject index
   2. An exercise from my fieldwork in Ireland: how would you index these pictures?
   3. An initial, pre-theoretical, arrangement
   4. A hint of an analysis (partially developed in my "Dublin 16" paper [1993])
2. A more recent example from fieldwork in Harlem, using Excel:
   1. part of a subject index