qualitative-coding 0.0.3

Qualitative coding tools for computer scientists

Interview Coding

Qualitative coding for comptuer scientists.

Qualitative coding is a form of feature extraction in which text (or images, video, etc.) is tagged with features of interest. Sometimes the codebook is defined ahead of time, other times it emerges through multiple rounds of coding. For more on how and why to use qualitative coding, see Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw's Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes or Shaffer's Quantitative Ethnography.

Most of the tools available for qualitative coding and subsequent analysis were designed for non-programmers. They are GUI-based, proprietary, and don't expose the data in well-structured ways. Concepts from computer science, such as trees, sorting, and filtering, could also be applied to qualitative coding analysis if the interface supported it.

Qualitative Coding, or qc, was designed to address these issues. The impetus was my own dissertation work.

Limitations

• Due to its nature as a command-line program, qc is only well-suited to coding textual data.
• qc uses line numbers as a fundamental unit. Therefore, it requires text files in your corpus to be hard-wrapped at 80 characters. The init task will handle this for you.
• Currently, the only interface for actually doing the coding is a split-screen in vim, with the corpus text on one side and comma-separated codes adjacent. This works well for me, but might not work well for you. I have other ideas in the pipeline, but they won't be around soon.

Installation

pip install qualitative-coding

Setup

• All the source files you want to code should be in a directory (possibly nested).
• Choose a working directory. Run qc init. This will create settings.yaml.
• In settings.yaml, update corpus_dir with the directory holding your source files. This may be relative to settings.yaml or absolute. Similarly, specify directories for codes_dir logs_dir, memos_dir, and the YAML file where you want to store your codebook. Unless you're particular, the default settings are fine.
• Run qc init --prepare_corpus --prepare_codes --coder yourname. This will hard-wrap all the text in your corpus at 80 characters and create blank coding files.

Usage

Workflow

qc is designed to give you a powerful terminal-based interface. The general workflow is to use code to apply qualitative codes to your text files. As you go, you will start to have ideas about the meanings and organization of your codes. Use memo to capture these.

Once you finish a round of coding, it's time to reorganize your codes. Use codebook to refresh the codebook based on new coding. Use stats to see the distribution of your codes. If you want to move codes into a tree, make these changes directly in the codebook's YAML. If you realize you have redundant codes, use rename.

The --coder argument supports keeping track of multiple coders on a project, and there are options to filter on coder where relevant. Analytical tools, such as correlations (on multiple units of analysis) and inter-rater reliatbility are coming.

Commands

Use --help for a full list of available options for each command.

init

Initializes a new coding project, as described above.

$ qc init

check

Checks that all required files and directories are in place.

$ qc check

code

Opens a split-screen vim window with a corpus file and the corresponding code file. The name of the coder is a required positional argument. Use --pattern to glob-match the corpus file you want to code. If multiple are matched, you will be prompted to choose. The --first-without-codes option is particularly useful for coding the next uncoded text.

$ qc code chris -f

codebook (cb)

Scans through all the code files and adds new codes to the codebook.

$ qc codebook

list (ls)

Lists all the codes currently in use. By default, lists them as a tree. The --expanded option will instead flatten the list of codes, and list each as something like subjects:math:algebra.

$ qc list --expanded

rename

Goes through all the code files and replaces one code with another. Removes the old code from the codebook.

$ qc rename funy funny

find

Displays all occurences of the provided code(s). With the --recursive option, also includes child codes in the codebook's tree of codes. Note that a code may appear multiple times in the codebook; in this case, the --recursive option will search for all children of all instances. When you want to grab text for a quotation, use the --textonly option. The --files option lets you filter which corpus files to search.

$ qc find math science art --recursive

stats

Displays frequency of usage for each code. Note that counts include all usages of children. List code names to show only certain codes. Filter code results with --depth, --max, and --min. Use the --expanded option to show the full name of each code, rather than the tree representation. Arguments to --format may be any supported by tabulate. The --files option lets you filter which corpus files to use in computing stats.

$ qc stats curriculum math algebra --depth 1