Separation of Data and Analysis

I thought I would contribute to the sadly underutilized blog that Jared so graciously created for us.

This is a continuation/elaboration to the question I asked today in discussion regarding the separation of data from analysis for Project 2. A big point was made in lecture not to assign meaning or purpose to the data from the informant, just because it's what we think is going on or what we want to be going on and fits nicely with our theories. This I understand. It gets complicated, when I myself become the informant as well as the cognitive enthnographer. How can I analyze my own actions without bias? How can I keep that data, what I am doing and what I know I am doing and that I know exactly what I am doing, and the analysis, how a cognitive ethnographer interprets (now me) what I am doing, separate? There is going to be no boundary.

Or maybe there doesn't have to be one. Perhaps I can use my detailed description of my actions as the pure data, as if I was an outsider describing a video of myself. Then, in a separate paragraph and part of the essay, I can analyze my actions from a cognitive ethnographer's POV, AS IF I, the cognitive ethnographer, conducted an intense, detailed inteverview with myself, the person partaking in the activity. In this sense, I can use all my knowledge about what I was doing and analyze myself using ideas and terms from this course. But then I can't truly separate data and analysis. I can't, as a cognitive ethnographer, assign meaning to something that I am doing if I, as the informant, know that is the wrong meaning. Or can I?

Maybe just separating data and analysis into two different paragraphs in my essay is good enough. Does the format I'm suggesting make sense and will it work for this project?