Aaron C. Thomas

Professor Jacqueline Cano Diaz

ENC 1102

19 June 2025

Reading Response 4

        According to Denny and Clark, the first step when working with different types of qualitative data is organizing and preparing it. Personally, in my research about how different fan-made genres ensure preservation about retrogaming, I applied qualitative coding methods to better understand how the texts that I pulled from various sources operate within the retro gaming community. First starting with my organization of my data, which consisted of README files, translation logs from ROMhacking.net, and Forum posts from PlanetVB/AtariAge, I made sure that any individual contributors were anonymous, only using names that were either user names or just referring to them by their project.

        Next I moved on to reading through my entire gathered dataset, this really helped me gain a better understanding of the tone, structure, and patterns of recurring information within these various texts. I was able to point out common features within these texts, a lot of which being preservation, restoration, and “fixing original bugs”.

        In the detailed coding phase, I made a coding table to summarize my findings and where they overlapped, themes like cultural preservation, ethical acknowledgement, and documentation were all put there. There were some things I left out, like how some authors include instructions on how to patch games yourself and which software they used to do so, which I thought was important to me, but not to the research at hand.

        I’d say the most challenging step of this whole thing was some of the ambiguity behind different subjective language, especially around the forum sites. Determining accurate meaning and a code for some of the different texts like READMEs and the forum site meant rereading through the entire document to make sure I had proper context. I had to kind of remind myself to be more like Denny and Clark, and make sure I remember that the process is iterative, and its ok to backtrack with fresh eyes.

        Moving back over to ethics, my main focus was to really push the honoring the intentions of these different fan authors, I made sure not to cherry pick the best ones, but give an overall picture of how these different fan-text themes presented across different documentation. I also tried to cite the authors whenever I did by never using their real name. I made sure not to frame ROM Hacking as piracy or something that is ethically a bad thing, I instead made sure to treat them with the same respect I would any other game.

        One question that I would pose to the rest of the class would be “What would be the best way we can still represent fan-texts without stripping away a lot of the personality and emotional tone, since that does play an important role within these texts” Its something I struggled with a bit in my further project, a lot of these texts hold a lot of emotional value for many different people, so to try to strip them down and look at them as pure data is hard for me.