 In this session today we're going to take a detailed look at Quercos which is a tool for qualitative analysis of text data. We're going to go through all the major features step by step and we're going to show you how to use it from scratch including downloading and installing it and getting to the stage where you're comfortable doing coding and producing outputs to represent your data. So the first thing that we're going to do is show you how to download the software. You can go straight to our website which is www.quercos.com and you can download a full free trial. Just click on the get Quercos button and then download and it doesn't matter whether you're working on Windows Mac or Linux you'll be able to download the software for yourself and download the full version of Quercos. So the trial is not restricted in any way it just lasts for a maximum of 28 days and after that you just need to buy a license and you can keep working on your projects. It's also worth bearing in mind that our licenses are very inexpensive so if you do like Quercos our licenses are permanent and don't expire. So I'm going to show you step by step what you'll get after you've installed the software. It's identical on all the platforms so it doesn't matter what system you are using whether it's Windows, Mac or Linux when you start it you'll get a dialogue like this. I've already a couple of days into my trial but it says there's 13 days left on my trial. So you just need to click on the continue trial button here and this basically then takes you to the project screening Quercos and this gives you a list of all the different projects that you've recently worked on in Quercos. Now you probably won't have any here at first so what you want to do is click on the new project button. The first thing I want you to put in here is an author name so this can be initials or your name. Now this is useful if you've got multiple people working on one project so you can see who did what work. There's also an option here to password protect the files so if you put in a password here you must make sure that they are identical and then you can password protect your file if that's useful if you're working with confidential data that you want to securely encrypt. There's also an option here for structured questions. Structured questions are basically when you're asking exactly the same questions in the same order to all of your participants so that will be in a structured interview, a formal structured interview or if you're bringing in data from an online survey platform like SurveyMonkey. So I'm going to leave that off for now because we're working with semi-structured data and then I'm going to click on the new project button. And then what this does is brings up the standard kind of file dialogue for your operating system and gives you the chance to choose where you want to save it so I'm saving it in the documents but I can put it on the desktop or somewhere else if I was feeling messy and this basically is going to be the project file that keeps all of your data together. So I'm going to call this workshop example and I'm going to save that onto my documents file. So that's created a new project which is going to hold all of our sources and all our data and if you ever wanted to move that file you can do that. You can also back it up via USB or emailing it to yourself or something like that. So now we've got a project open. We can see with the title at the top of the screen what that is workshop example and I'm ready to start working on the project. Now at the moment it's empty but you'll see the screen is split in two and we can move it from side to side with this divider here. On the left side of the screen this is what we call the canvas area and this holds the codes, the quirks or themes that we want to use to explore and analyse our data. On the right side of the screen that's where we have our sources of text data that we're going to analyse. At the moment that's empty so you'll see along the top it says click to add source. This button on the very top right here this shows us the different options for bringing sources of data into your project file. So copies them in from whatever source you have. The first option you have here is to create a blank source. Now a blank source is useful if you want to amalgamate a couple of sources together. You can copy and paste in here but also if you want to type. So if you want to have ongoing comments. So I can right click on any text in Quercos and edit it. So it says edit source text here and I'll type in here and say this is my search journal and keep a note of my analysis process here. The advantage of this is that you can code it in exactly the same way that you would with any of the actual sources of data in your project. But later on you can see results that don't include that data. So just from your actual sources of data rather than showing your research journals as well. Now the first thing I'm going to do actually here is show you the settings so I can make the text a little bit here. It's not very easy for you to see so I'm going to click on the settings button here. There's an option here for general project preferences and the first option here lets you make the text a bit bigger. So I'm going to make it quite comically big here just so that you can see what's going on here. So that's the first source we brought into the project. It's called source one. I'm going to click on this tab here. So there's two tabs for each source. One on the left is for the text. So the actual data and the one on the right is for what we call the source properties. So that's any way that we want to characterize and describe the different sources of data in our project. But it also allows us to change the title. So I'm going to change the title from source one to research journal. And then I'm going to create a new property which is called source type. So these can be absolutely anything and I'm going to call this journal. It could be reflexive notes or something like that. Okay so now we know that our research journal is a source type journal. So let's bring in some actual sources of data and see how we would work and delimit those. So the other options here to add sources we have import source select files. So if I click on select file here I can choose some files that are existing on the computer. So any source of text files. So these can be word files. They can be plain text files. They can also be PDF files. So you can bring in journal articles and literature review if you have those here. You've also got an option here to import source from the clipboard. So if you've copied and pasted something for example from a web page you can create a source directly from that here. There's also an option import sources from CSV. Now that's the comma separated values file. And that's a common kind of output that you'll get from Excel or also from online survey platforms. I said like Survey Monkey or Cortrex. So if you wanted to do qualitative analysis of some survey data that would be the way to bring that in but also keeping all of your source property. So if you already had data for things like age and gender and when the interview was conducted that would allow you to automatically bring that in without typing up that data again. The final option here is select a folder and that will bring in a whole folder of sources at once. So if all of your transcripts that you want in your project are one folder just choose this option and it will bring in everything in one go. So I'm just going to choose the select files here and then I'm going to go straight to the example project which you can also download from our website. So this example project here I've got one, two, three, four, five sources here and I'm going to bring those in by just using the shift key to select multiple ones. But you can bring in them one at a time as well if you like. So I'm going to click on open and then it will say five sources have been imported. So those are the five I selected. Click OK. And now you'll see along the top here we've got these tabs to go through the different sources. And if I click on the text tab here, right, so now I'm seeing Jane's source, Sarah, Mabarek. So these are the different sources that we have in the project. There's actually more than this available. Quercos only shows the three most recently used sources as tabs along the top. So if we click on this button here, that's our source browser and that shows all of the sources that we have in the project. So you can also see that there is a source for Mabel here which we don't see but just clicking on Mabel will allow me to see everything which down in there. This list you can scroll up and down with the mouse button. You can also search in here as well. If I was looking for Simon's file, for example, I'll just type, start typing Simon and that pops up here. We can also remove sources from this view with the X button here. Now this is the only action in Quercos that you can't undo. Removing sources can't be undone once you've done it. So always ask if you're sure you want to do that. I'm actually going to say no and keep that source in there. The other thing you'll see listed here, let's remove this here, is the percentage button. This percentage indicator shows you how much of this source has been coded. It's a good kind of way to see which sources you've worked on, which sources might need a little bit more work, but don't always feel that you need to get to 100%. You don't have to code everything in your source. Some things are likely to be unimportant. There's also an option here to change the order. We can put it in descending alphabetical order by title. We can also put it in order of how much coding we've done, which is none at the moment. This is the way we manage all the sources in our project. You can add dozens or hundreds of sources in this way. Now we've brought in our sources of text. It's time that we describe them a little differently. If you remember before when we created the research journal, we shifted here to the source properties tab that's indicated by this grid here. It's toggling backwards and forwards through the tabs for the sources. We've got this example here for source properties. The source properties, as I briefly mentioned, are a way that you can describe anything you want to about the sources. Any data that you know that you wouldn't include about the text. Maybe the name of the participant, when you did the interview, what source of data it is. For example, an interview or a focus group, or something about the participant, like their age and gender. For example, in here, we use this little plus button here to quickly add a new property. It's a new property, which is age. We put in a value for a label source here of 22. Now we've got a new property called age, and a value called 22. We'll create one more property here in the same way. We'll call this location, and give it a name. That's the answer. You can see in this way that the source properties can be numeric, they can be text, they can be discrete. They can even be very long, so you can have something like comments. It's a great way of categorizing and tagging and commenting on all the sources in your project. You can use these flexibly in any way that you could imagine, basically. One of the other things that we already did here was create this source type variable. The only thing that we have so far with this drop-down box here is journal. This is showing us a list of the different values for this property that we already have in the project. I can click here on new value, and I can say interview. That's an interview. We could also have source type, which was a focus group or a survey or something like that. If we go to one of the other tabs now, so we go to Jains, we'll see we have all these categories here, all these properties exist, but we don't have values. It says no values associated. With the drop-down boxes, we can use any values that we've already entered. Jane's source is also an interview. She's not 22. She's actually 34. We can put in a new value for her. She's not based in Edinburgh. She's based in Washington, D.C. The comments are, I don't remember this one. As we'll see in the future, this is a very useful way to cut across our sources, see the results from just one type of participant. So, for example, everyone over a certain age or everybody in one location. There's no reason that you have to put in the source properties when you bring in the sources of text at the beginning. You can do it at any time, and so that gives you the flexibility to come up with new characteristics as you think they might be important to the data. There's also a little option here at the top right to show a graph of the properties of all the sources in the project. What it's saying, actually, is most of these are not defined right now. But also we can see that 17% of our sources are located in Edinburgh and 17% are in Washington, D.C. As we have more data to the project, this will be a little more useful. We can go back to this, either with a little X here, or clicking on the properties button there, and we get back to the source properties. Now, when we're done with the source properties, we can just click back here to see the text. We're now still on Jane's tab here. That's the highlighted one there. Anytime we can switch between the source properties and the text for that source. That's how we can categorize and group the sources in our project. The next thing that we probably want to look at is to actually create a coding framework. We have the sources of data in our project. We've categorized them in some way. Now we actually want to do some coding with them. This is done with the canvas area on the left side of the screen, and what are called the quirks, also called the themes, or the nodes, or the codes, are created with this big circular plus button here. What this does is create a new bubble, a random place somewhere on the screen with a random color, which is used to hold together all of the text, which is about one theme. This example, we're talking about healthy eating options for breakfast. What we're going to do is just have an option here, which is for cereal. It's something that people are talking about. There's an option here for a longer description if it's not clear what you mean by cereal. Stuff you have milk, and you can also change the color here. You can have any color at all, so 16 million colors available. You can even have different shades and things like that. Cereal, I guess, should probably actually be some kind of brown shade, so we'll keep it like that. Then we'll click on the Save button here at the bottom left. Now we can see we've got this little cereal bubble here, and I can click and drag and move it anywhere along the screen I like. I can start to put it somewhere that makes sense for me, and helps me to group and structure the project. If I want to put some text onto that, all I need to do is select a text. This first sentence, I usually have a pretty group back first every day. I start with cereal, usually Moosey. This is about cereal. I'm going to click and drag the mouse cursor to select that sentence, select the text I want, and then drag and drop that text onto the bubble. What that's done is added it to the cereal category. We've also got a color-coded highlight strip here, which shows that this is about cereal. As we go along, it will show us all of the different ways in which we've coded the text data. If you hover the mouse over this highlight strip here, it'll show you a little pop-up showing what that is if you don't remember what the color means. You can also right-click on this highlight strip to remove the highlight, and that undoes that coding for that particular sentence and for that particular theme that you added it to. I should point out at this point that there is undo and redo buttons at the top of the screen here. You can undo and redo any of the things that you do in QueerCost with the exception of removing sources. If you change your mind about something, not a big problem. That's the first bit of text here. What we might do is go to someone else's source and see, okay, the baby has porridge, shreddies, rice, crispies. This is also about cereal. I'll drag and drop that onto the cereal bubble as well. Now you can see that the cereal bubble started to get larger. These bubbles in QueerCost grow bigger as you add more text to them. The more sources of text you add, the bigger they get. You're always getting an overview on the canvas of what themes you've coded most and what themes are coming out. Hovering the mouse over it will tell you a bit more information. In this case, it shows us the description, stuff you have with milk, and also where those codes have come from. One has come from Mabel, one has come from Jane, and there's only one coded piece of text in each of those sources total. 100% of the text that we've coded in Mabel and Jane is about cereal so far. Okay, so that's changed that. Now what we might decide to do here is this theme about cereal is a bit vague. We might want to have something where we tag a little bit more specifically to see what people are talking about. I'm going to click on this plus button here once more. Create another bubble. This one we're going to call Rice Krispies. I'm going to put a description. I'm going to put a yellow color. Click on Save. Now we have another bubble called Rice Krispies. This piece of text here, which is about Rice Krispies, I can drag and drop that onto the Rice Krispies bubble like that. Now you'll see that there are two highlight strips here. So it's showing that this piece of text is about cereal and this little bit, part of it, is also about Rice Krispies. But the other thing I can do is create subcategories, a hierarchy of coding by moving bubbles on top of each other. So if I click and drag and move the Rice Krispies bubble onto the cereal bubble, I've now created a subcategory of cereal called Rice Krispies, and this makes logical sense Rice Krispies is a type of cereal. And I can create as many subcategories of these as I like. So I can also have one here for Shreddies. Maybe a different color of brown. And I can have another one here for porridge. I'm not sure if that's technically a type of cereal, but there we go. And I can drag and drop these onto the cereal bubble. And now you can see when you put your mouse over the cereal bubble, you'll see the subcategories that you've coded there. They all pop out. So now I can code this section of text to be about Shreddies as well, and this bit of text about porridge. So you just drag onto the parent category, and then the subcategories pop out, and you drag and drop onto the one you want. And now you can see this bit of text is about lots of different things, and the color codes show us how we've coded it. So that's the basics of doing the coding and creating the codes and themes in Quercos. Now you don't have to create subcategories like this, and you can also change your mind at any time. You can pull out a category. So, yeah, porridge, I'm really sure that is cereal, but so that's been pulled out there, and you can change your mind at any time. You can also create subcategories. So I might have, you know, like a kind of own brand subcategory for Rice Krispies. We're talking about a particular type of Rice Krispies. We've got a subcategory there. That's the maximum level of depth that you can have. Any more than that does start to get a bit confusing, so we don't really support that. We don't really recommend that you go that deep with your subcategories. But remember, there's other ways that you can group and cluster things just by keeping things together. And at any time, you can pull out your codes, pull out your subcategories, pull out your subcategories, or go back the way you like. So Quercos gives you lots of tools like this to manage your codes. So that's a little bit of coding that we've done in this theme. Now, if we wanted to see the results of our coding, all we need to do is double click on the bubble that we're interested in. So let's double click on the cereal bubble, and now we get to see a fully expanded list of the subcategories and the sub-subcategories here as well. But also the text that's associated with them. So this has been coded to be about cereal. This has been coded to be about lots of things. So if we want to see just the text for Rice Krispies, we can click on that. That's just the text across all of the sources, which is about Rice Krispies. Now, at the moment, we've only coded things from one source. If we went back home here, it takes us back to the main view. Whatever situation you get to, if you're here on the home button, we'll take you back to this main view. We can go to Jane's source. We can code some more stuff to be about cereal. Put this into the Rice Krispies category. Now, if we double click on the cereal bubble, click on Rice Krispies, we can see this text that comes from Jane and also from Mabel here. And if you've coded... So here I've coded the whole sentence. It might not be always clear what the context is. And these little dot-dot-dot buttons here, wherever you see a quote that's come from one of the sources, they could be used to expand the text around it. So I can see more of the source around it and then I can read the context about it. So that's useful if I did something like... If I just coded one single word, now I look at Shreddies, I can just see the word eggs. Okay, I shouldn't have done that because I have no idea what I'm really talking about here. But I can load more of the source like this and then I can even code in this view and make sure that the whole of that sentence there is coded to be about eggs or Shreddies as I've done it in this respect. So this view is also very useful when you're going through later and trying to recode because you can code from this view. Click on the Home button here. Now, one of the other things that you might want to do at some stage in the future is merge some of these themes. So for example, we've got this theme here for porridge. Earlier on, I didn't even think there was a particularly good idea that we had it as a subcategory of cereal. But I might now also decide that I don't actually want it anymore. But I still want to keep the text that I've coded in here. So I've got, yeah, I have a sentence here which is about porridge. I don't want to lose that. So what I'm going to do is actually merge this into the cereal category. I don't need the detail of having a separate code for porridge, every instance of porridge. But I can put this into the cereal category by right clicking on the bubble. Now, this gives me a lot of different views of different things that I can do with each of the different themes, the codes, the quirks on the canvas. And there's this option here, merge. If I choose mere... Oh, it's going to choose cereal anyway. It says which source do you want to... which quirk do you want to merge this into? I'm going to merge everything that I've coded into porridge into the cereal bubble. Just like that. Okay, great. So now cereal. Yeah, that's got my sentence there about porridge. So that, again, helps you in the future to manage all of your codes, especially if you've got lots of them. And don't forget, there's always the undo button and redo button if you change your mind. Let's look at some of those other options of the different things that you can do with the codes by right clicking on them. The first option is the overview. And that's what you get when you double click on it. Basically, that gives you the list of all of the different sources, the different quotations that you have from each of the sources. The other thing I have here, I can right click and click on the overlap view. That will show me how often one code interacts with one of the others. Well, it shows very much at the moment. We'll come back to that in a minute. There's also the edit view. That basically gives me the same options that I got when I created it. So I can change the title. I can change the description. I can change the color here as well. And that will update across the whole project. There's also the merge view, which we looked at before. Also duplicate view. So if you wanted to basically change a little bit, so remove some of the things from the porridge theme, basically to split that out. So imagine you wanted porridge and whole wheat porridge. So that way you could duplicate everything that you coded about porridge and remove everything in one theme that's about whole grain porridge. And that way you'd have two separate themes, which are slightly different, but based on each other. And the last option here is delete to actually remove one of the themes from the project. Okay? So that's the basics of working with these codes. I'm now going to show you one other way that you can group these themes together. And that's with the groups function. Now, here we've created a hierarchical view like this, where there are sub-sub-categories. But what if we had things that wanted to belong to more than one category? So for example, if we had something here like juice, and we had something here like orange, that'd better be orange, hadn't it? So with these themes here, we might have something, we might be talking about sub-categories of juice, which are orange and apple. But this could be a little confusing, because actually juice is something that we can eat as well. But juice we can't eat, juice is something we really drink. We can eat an apple and we can eat an orange. But the groups allow us to create non-hierarchical groups and clusters of themes. So if I click on group, a new and change group, I've got the option here to add a new one. So we'll add one called things to eat. Click on new group. And then another one called things to drink. Okay. So now we've got these two groups, which are kind of invisible to us at this stage. But what we can do is right click on any of the bubbles and assign them to one of the groups, or more than one of the groups. So for example, if we right click on juice and then choose edit, now you'll see in the groups dialog here, we've got these different options for the groups that we can eat. So first of all, we've got, juice is not something we can eat, but it is something to drink. So let's add it to the things to drink group. Click save. Now orange, oranges, now that's something that we can eat. It's also something we can drink as juice. So that can belong to both of those themes. And the same with apple, that belongs to both of those. But cereal, for example, that's not something we can really drink. That's just something we're going to eat. So now if I click on the groups button, I can actually change the visibility of these. So maybe I just want to see the themes which are drinkable things. Okay, so that's apple. We can drink apple juice, drink orange juice, and we can drink juice. I turn that off and choose things to eat. Now we don't see juice anymore, but these are things to eat. So apple oranges belong to both of those categories. They're both visible when we turn those on. And if we can put on all of the things that belong to any of the groups, so now these are things which are eatable or drinkable. I'll turn those off to go back to the main theme. Now it's a difficult concept to kind of describe in this way, but it's a very flexible tool for grouping, especially if you go through and doing multiple levels of coding. So what we've got here is a very kind of descriptive coding framework. We're very basically saying people are literally talking about these things. But it may be that we go through and do a higher level of analysis where we're talking about the inferences and what people are meaning by this, what the implications are, you know, for something like healthy eating or the wider society or some big level concept like that that connects with theory. And in that case we could have two groups of theory, two separate groups here for our codes. So we could have a whole bunch of groups which are descriptive, coding. We could have another coding set which is for higher theory. So again, things like serial, this belongs really to our very kind of low level descriptive coding, but if we started to have themes we're saying things like concepts of self. We had another one which was health and well-being. So these are much kind of higher level themes and what we can do is put those into the higher theory category. And some themes might belong to both of these. So concepts of self, that's not going to be in the descriptive coding, but maybe very well-being, the health and well-being is something that people are going to very explicitly talk about as well as something that we're going to infer as a kind of high level theme. So now we can see just the things which are on our higher theory or just the things which are descriptive coding, serial and these things as well. So the groups can be a very flexible way to create groups and this helps a lot when you are managing a lot of codes when you've got a very large number of codes that we're trying to work through because you can change the visibility and then you can only see half at any one time. Now let's look at some other ways that we can do some coding. The option here with the magnifying glass which allows us to do a text search across all of the different sources which are in the project. So I can very quickly put in a word here like serial and it's showing me literally every time in all of the sources where the word serial applies. And I can code directly from this so I can drag and drop that straight onto the serial bubble and then if I don't see the full sentence I can choose the little dot dot dot buttons to load more of the source. So if you're looking for very literal words every time a particular word appears then you can code in this way. There's also a synonyms database built in here and that allows you to be a little bit less specific about the different themes that you are working on. So if we turn that on we'll see that there are other options here so it doesn't have very many synonyms for serial food grain grain. I'm not sure that's going to bring up anything else I might have mentioned grain but again that helps you to be a little bit less specific and think about different words. So if you're looking for something like fear or afraid then it'll make sure that you're picking up and making sure that you're always getting that relevant context. A bunch of other options in the search category as well by default you're searching across all of the sources but you can also choose just to search the one tab that you have currently open that's Jane's here so toggle back and forwards through there there's a history of all the searches that you've run so you can run those again if you're starting to build something very complex you can also choose whether to search for whole words or bits of words alternate endings like serial, serials serialing you can also choose to refine your search just to the coded text so this is text I've already coded to something which is also about serial but you can also choose to refine it in other words so remember we've got those source properties in here now we can also see results just from people who are 22 years old so that's Mabel right so those are the times that people 22 year olds mention serial so again we wanted to be more specific about the codes and also just looking at inferences of different words then the search tools help us do that when we're done with the search we can just click on the little cross button here, toggle the search panel close that and then come back to this main view again now there's one other way that I'm going to show you that we can do some analysis of the text as we go and read through it and that's with the memos feature there you'll see there's a little M cloud bubble here that's for the memos panel and opening that gives us another kind of column along the side here and what we can do is drag and drop a bit of text in the same way as we put it onto one of the codes but onto the memo column and adding to the memo column allows us to write a little kind of a little note that's attached to a particular section of text so in here we can type this is about a husband and then so that's a bit of clarification for us or we could say you know this it's very interesting time to make their own read so you can go through and you can have as many comments as you like and whenever you hover your mouse over it will show you exactly which section of text that's associated with you can edit and change this anytime and this is another way to write kind of reflexive writing so reflexive text which is your kind of interpretations and comments you can also use this for using and for doing what's called in vivo coding which is using the participants own words to categorize what they're saying so this saying quite hungry very particular terminology and then this person here is saying what I really like so you can go through and you can use quercast to read and annotate your text you don't have to do any coding if that's the analytical style that you want to do you don't have to use any of these codes you don't have to assign text to codes you can just use the memos and then later on when you're feeling that you've gone through all of it you can start to put these in themes so I create one for like here like bubble now clicking on one of the memos sections will highlight that text so it's very quick to actually code from the memos so you can code from the memos onto your other themes hungry we don't have something for that but what we can do is actually drag and drop text onto this plus button here and that will add the text to a new theme that we didn't even create yet so this is hunger and that's a piece of text for hunger is already there if we double click on it so quite a few flexible ways to go through and see your data and now any time that you see your text if we look at hunger here you'll see the memos here if you have the memos column open you can close it like that and even when the memos column is closed you'll still see the little icon so you know that there's a little memo here and double clicking on it will open and close the panel and let you see what the text is and also hide it if you're not interested in your memos for this particular part of the analysis so that's the memos that's the coding bringing in the sources of text those are the source properties now what we're going to do at this stage is open a project where we've gone through and done a lot more coding so that's really the basics of doing most of the operations in Quercos now what you want to go through is read sentence by sentence, every word they say according to your framework creating new themes as you go if you're doing kind of a theory approach what I want to show you now is some of the tools to help you visualize and explore the data once you've got a whole bunch of coding done so I'm going to open up a file which uses the same sources but I've already gone through and done the coding and creating a coded framework and I can do that just by clicking on the project button and then open your existing file and I'm going to open another project you'll see there is a save button as button here but there is no save button now Quercos is constantly saving as you go through the project so every time you do an option every time you add something a piece of coding it clicks save so if you close the software if the computer crashes if the power conks out it's saved to the last status you have so it's very difficult to lose your data in Quercos as long as you're backing up that project file in case something catastrophic happens to your computer but that also means that you can just open another project any time come back to it there it is workshop example but I can click on open other here if I go to my example project there we go, coded example breakfast and this example is on our website as well so you can download this even if you don't have your own data to play with and use it to get to use Quercos so here's Cyra's text I'm just going to make the text size a bit bigger because that wasn't an option on this project great so you can see that again that's happened here we go to Simon's source yep, lots of coding here again this is showing us all the different coding we've done there's a little thing here to zoom into the canvas so we can see that a little closer and we've got some subcategories here different things we could eat for breakfast different family members here so that's basically how I've done the coding there's also a little search bar here so if you've got lots of themes up here I was like, oh did I do one for T? yep, there's the T one you just start typing here and there's an instant search for themes on the canvas that really helps you find when you've got lots of different themes right so now let's look at some of the ways that Quercos helps you once you've coded the data make sense of your qualitative analysis so one of the first things that we looked at when we right clicked on themes was this the overlap view now what this basically does is show us all the instances like this where one piece of text has been coded to more than one theme and what might be interesting is to see how many times one theme occurs with another one so if we right click on the dislike theme for example and choose edit sorry not edit the overlap view we get this kind of then diagram where dislike is in the center that's the theme we chose and the bubbles which are closest to it are those which overlapped most so the ones where we coded most often with dislike so we often said that people dislike their children they dislike juice and they dislike fruit and the further out we go from the center so this is two overlaps, this is one overlap there's zero these ones on the outside there were no overlaps but we can click on any of these themes if we click on dislike and fruit we can see here are the two instances where someone said they didn't like fruit so this person says my partner really doesn't like grapefruit that comes from Jane's source here and then this person here is saying that they do like fruit it's not always the freshest fruit something a bit negative there which we tagged and that's why that's coming as an overlap there and if we click on toast for example see yeah somebody didn't like this particular brand of toast but you can also code in this view as well and you can see how it updates so this is about toast but it's also about kind of a healthy bread so we can drag and drop down to healthy and now you see that comes closer it's coming closer to the center as there's more of an overlap and these highlights here overlapping highlights that's what it's kind of counting across all the different sources so click on the home button to go back to the main view and you'll see that this is working for all of the different themes that we have here so that's what people liked most by clicking on like and then overlap okay healthy eating options so people liked the healthy options a lot people liked toast two things for toast two things for fruit again so we can kind of look through the text and maybe we'll be surprised but now we've got this text maybe we want to get it out of quercoss and into something else in other ways that we can do that as well so one of the things that we can do is copy and paste text that we have here into another software that we're using to write up and we can do that from anywhere where we see quotes in quercoss so here we've got this is everything where people said that they liked fruit and these little tick boxes here allows to select those themes select those quotes all with this button at the top we can select all of them and then there's a copy button here so we keep up with the copy selected parts we'll copy those two quotes and then if I bring this is LibreOffice or Word or whatever and you paste in here that's our text that we've copy and pasted from our source so there's Saira's quote there's Jane's quote so now we can copy and paste everything where people said something positive about fruit so you can see this is a really quick way to get your data out of quercoss into the section that you're writing about and also just to tag different bits of text that were interesting so it's really interesting to see these are all the positive things that people said about fruit so anywhere where you see quotes in quercoss you'll be able to you'll see this little tick box here and you can select and copy the quotes so that's a really useful tool I'm going to click on the home button again and now what I'm going to do is run a query so if you remember previously we created some source properties in this example project we have gender, we have age again we've got city, kind of like location again but we can use these properties to filter our results and just see results from particular sources or particular groups of sources so that's done with the query view so if I click on the query button here the query view lets us basically run a search for matching quotes anything which we have in the project database so the properties is one of those things the source properties is one of the things but we can also look for work done by particular people or work we did on a particular day so maybe at the start or end of your project you can search for results by group or source title if you wanted to see results just from one particular person or group of people but I'm going to keep property here I'm going to change this from gender to city we've got city equals Belfast and then there's an update button here and if we click that there we go, that updates that the results and now we can see these are the results of it looks like it's just Simon that lives in Belfast but it's everybody that lives in Belfast it's solidly descending order so this is the thing that people in Belfast were talking about most so maybe that's interesting in itself well we can select all of those quotes we can copy them and then we can paste them as everything that people in Belfast said about diet but we can also split the screen in half and do a comparison so if I click on the compare button here this splits the screen in two so we've got one quote query being run on the left here that's our city equals Belfast that's two city equals what else do we have in here? Edinburgh, great we'll click on update and now side by side we can see the differences between the projects so Jane so Jane lives in Edinburgh does anyone else live in Edinburgh? yeah, Sara, so Sara and Jane both live in Edinburgh we can click on these bubbles to see how much the people from Edinburgh are talking about particular things what's interesting straight away is in Edinburgh people eat more toast than they do in Belfast according to this, or at least we've coded more sections of text from our Belfast participants than we have sorry, from our Edinburgh participants than we have from our Belfast participants again, maybe this is something that's interesting so Quirkus is always trying you not to rely on the numbers but getting you to read back and read the qualitative text and see if this is a worthy trend or whether it's just some kind of coincidence in the way that we've been coding now we can also make these queries more and more complicated as well so for example here we've got people who live in Edinburgh we can add an extra row to the query and we can see maybe we just want people in Edinburgh who were you know over or under the age of 22 we update that do we have anyone there? no, okay so maybe that way yeah, I think it's the same people the idea is that you can add more and more people more and more categories to your searches and if you want to see people who are just the men from Edinburgh who are over 22 then you can do that and you can also use this side by side comparison to compare your different groups of people together and the update button here will give you will rerun the query so to update whatever you've changed here the single button will toggle back to the single view you can make the different columns, different widths here you can hide the panel if you like if you want to see it in the kind of more full screen mode so lots of different ways that you can kind of play with the data here so now we'll go back to the main view, zoom in and we'll look at some of the ways that we can export the data and do reports from our data so we click on the export button there's a whole bunch of options here let's look at the first one which is to create a report now the reports are pretty boring pretty comprehensive standard thing which basically gives us all the information that we have about everything that's in the project basically so you'll see here that the screen is split in half and on the left side of the screen we've got a preview of what the report will look like and on the right the options of different headings that we can have so there's a sources summary here that gives us all the different sources that we've brought in this project we don't need to see that, we can untick that section you can also scroll down and you can see there's graphs here of our source properties there's the views now any of the images in the report you can drag or right click and save the image if you want to put it into PowerPoint or into your report that you're writing up so any of the visualizations you can have in that way and there's also a bunch of ways to make visualizations as well keep scrolling down you'll see the properties here so here's the actual text there we go so that's everything people said about healthy everything people said about serial and like and dislike and you can also include the properties in here so here so now we've got for every quote who said it, how old they were where they lived, their gender change it so it's text by source rather than text by theme so there's everything that yeah that's everything Mabarak said and everything Simon said so there's a whole bunch of different options here and when you've got the report showing the information you want and formatted in the way you want you can either print it out directly you can open it in a web browser play with it a bit more you can save it as a word file you can save it as a web page a pdf of our report uh export open that file right and now we've got a pdf pdf file we can share with someone which has got all the data formatted in just the way we wanted it great that's one of the export options the other one here is the word cloud you've probably seen these before they're kind of fun but there's another way to visualize the language that people use basically this is a frequency analysis of all the different words in the project and shows us what the most common words are so we zoom out a little bit so it's so like it's toast usually and you can format maybe you want it in a star pattern or something else you can have a threshold here there's also a stop list included so this has a stop list of 150 most commonly used words in spoken English but you can also add extra ones here so so we don't really need to see that so we can remove that here so then you can get a sense of what people are talking about there's also a list here of a literal kind of count of all the different words and i is the one that appears most often 55 occurrences and then finally there's the option up here choose which sources so if you want to see just what one person was saying compare that to someone else and you can do that just by choosing which sources to count in the export and again you can save this as a web page or you can save it as an image which you can embed in a powerpoint presentation a poster or whatever you're doing so that's kind of fun there's also the option here to do a spreadsheet export a CSV export so what that does is create can create a folder to save all those files it basically creates spreadsheet files which let you bring your coded data into another piece of software especially something where you want to do some quantitative analysis like SPSS or R or even Excel so I can open for example quotes I think it's going to open in in open office here yeah so now we've got a kind of standard spreadsheet here with all the data that's coded in the project so here's a quote breakfast we're going to have toast or cereal come from Sara's sauce toast I coded it and such and such a time and then you can use any of the tools here so you can sort things alphabetically you can do you can use the pivot tables and the content analysis you can do a lot more statistical methods interactive liability and things like that if you've got multiple coders so it basically gives you a lot of different ways that you can play with the data outside of Quercos so that's pretty useful if you're looking for something a little bit more quant there's also the ability to export all of your imported coded transcripts with your coding as a standard word file so you can create either one word document for each of the sources you imported so basically getting them back out again or you can create one long word document with all your transcripts in it and the neat thing about this is that you can share it with someone who just has Word or Libre Office or Google Docs anything that will open a standard word file and that will basically give you a show you as a kind of with the color coded highlights just as if you you've done this on paper with highlighters or if you coded it in Word using the comments theme here so again this is really nice to print out especially if you've got a color printer read it away from the software but the other thing that you can do with this is share it with your supervisor or someone else that you want to show kind of how you're going and you're thinking at this time and they can not only see the transcript but exactly how you've been coding it even without using any special software so that's a pretty unique thing there's also the option here to export as QDPX file this is the REFI QDA standard and this is basically by the end of the year will be supported by all qualitative software packages it means that you can import and export your coded data from any software package to another so if you've done some work in MVVO and you want to bring it into Quercos or vice versa you can do that with the QDPX project file you can also save just the sources from your project or just the structure just the coding framework without the sources this option what that does is let you reuse the structure so if you had a standard coding framework so for example standard evaluation template that you want to use on another project you can delete all of your coding and delete all of the sources and save just the just the coding framework to use again and vice versa if you use export just the sources of the project that will show you just the sources removing the coding framework and then maybe you'll have someone else redo the coding in a different way or if you just want to start from scratch and try a completely new coding framework again but I don't want to have to put in all the sources and source properties again so that's a whole bunch of different ways that you can get the data out of Quercos when you've done the coding there's just one final thing which I'm going to show you here and that's basically how you can use Quercos to kind of look at your coding framework in a slightly different way so we've got this ability here to move the bubbles around you may probably get to the stage where you've got quite a lot of themes especially if you've got a lot of clustered themes and it's going to be a bit difficult to see what's going on there with the view button here you've got a whole bunch of different options about how you can display the codes that works in Quercos one of the options here is TreeView and that basically creates a list and it's a lot more like how you'd see it in Envivo or Atlas TI or some of the older qualitative software so if you're more familiar working like that it works in exactly the same way you can still right click to see all the same options you can still drag and drop text onto these but it's especially helpful if you've got lots of things coded because you can just keep lots of subcategories or lots of codes a big list of them basically and you can turn that off and on here there's also the option to put things in a grid arrangement so you can put them by alphabetical order you can put them in the sending order of size or a sending order of size and there's also an option here to show the number of codes so by default Quercos tries to not make you focus too much on the number of different codes that you assign to each of your themes you can do the relative size but you can turn on with this view option the number of codes and then you can see exactly how that is and all of these options of rearranging the canvas and showing your data are available in the report as well so however you want to kind of capture your coding framework and share with others you can do in a very visual and creative way with Quercos so that's all the basics of working with data in Quercos I should also mention here in the project files the save as option now if you wanted to create a separate file so that you've got a kind of snapshot of your work at a particular time use the save as button for that there's also the option here for merging projects now this is particularly useful if you're working with a group of people and you've been coding separately you can bring all of your data together in one project or maybe if you've got two different things you want to bring together so you do all your interviews in one file and then you've started all your coding of your focus groups in another we can bring them all together in one project and that creates a new project when you merge them together so it doesn't actually mean that you lose any of the data with your separate projects you'll keep your separate project files that's the same if you're working other people you also get to keep the files of how you're working individually but you can also create a file at any time where you can see all the work which different people did okay so that's all that we're going to go over today again there's a lot more information on our website if you wanted to see some of the different ways to use Quercos there's a lot more guides and tutorials on there more video guides including some kind of 10 minute overviews much more detailed ones here there's also full manuals as well so we've got manuals and materials here so there's a complete manual here there's a getting started guide which kind of gives you step by step going into the project for the first time you can print these out we can also send you printed copies of them as well and we'd also recommend that you just play with it so give Quercos a try play and explore the software and see how you get on with it and if you've got any questions at all you can also get in touch with us via our website or by emailing us so don't get stuck get in touch with us we're always here to give you as much help and advice as you need so thanks very much and hope you enjoy using Quercos