Open Source Qualitative Coding Tool

[bduckles]

I would love to see a lightweight, non GUI, open source qualitative coding tool. I know that RQDA exists, but I’ve never gotten it to work and it appears it hasn’t been updated since 2012. I could be missing something (please tell me if I am!) but I rarely have seen anything that is open source, uses R and actually works to help with coding.

There are a myriad of text coding tools out there, many of which are quite sophisticated and complex (NVIVO, Atlas TI, MAX QDA). None of these are open source, all of them cost a lot of money. For most of what people need when doing basic qualitative analysis, this can be like bringing an industrial grade shredder when all you need is a paring knife. I’ve started using the mac program Annotations to do basic, small scale coding projects. It’s kind of a GUI paring knife. Cons: It's only available for macs and is not being further developed, it’s not open source and it’s a GUI.

I’d love to see something where the data analysis is more reproducible and open source. Can we please just make an open source paring knife for qualitative coding?

Most of what folks need when doing qual research is a way to highlight text and code it. There are complicated things you can do with those codes, there’s the issue of concatenated codes or multiple codes and there are more things to worry about once you have the codes etc. But if we had a straightforward way to yank quotes out of a text file, code them and then dump all of that into a dataset, I suspect people would happily use it so that they don’t have to shell out $$$ for a an industrial grade coding tool to do a simple text analysis project.

One idea would be to use some form of markdown-like syntax to use with text files that would indicate the coding of quotes within the text. Then an R package would pull out the quotes with the codes attached and create a dataset from a text file, possibly also with the text file name as a variable. It’d be simple, it wouldn’t do all the things one might want but it would be a starting place. This is just an idea, I’d love more ideas/advice/thoughts on how to manage something like this.

Also, IANA developer. I’m a noob R coder, but I do love mixed methods and R and know a lot of folks who would love to find a solution.