 Hello and welcome to this short introduction to Quercos. What is Quercos? Well, it's software for qualitative analysis. So that's for using qualitative sources of data and exploring and analyzing trends and patterns in them. Now it's important to point out that Quercos as well as other qualitative software doesn't do the analysis for you. It's really just a tool to help you manage and code qualitative text data. So what's coding? Well, coding is where you have topics of interest which are represented by codes or themes. You can have as many of these as you need and you can group them around. And there may be something very simple like every time someone talks about something they dislike or it might be a very complicated kind of high level concept. But whatever it is, Quercos shows these as bubbles which are sometimes called Quercs in the interface. And the role of coding is to manually sort your text data so all of your different sources read through it and assign sections of text to one or more of the codes that match it. Now why would you want to do this? Well, it helps you with the analysis process. Coding is really just the start of it. It can be seen as the kind of first step to analysis which helps you look for patterns in the data across the codes, so where codes are occurring together, where people are talking about different topics in the same area or across sources. So are people talking about the same things in the same way or slightly differently? And is there some trend or pattern that shows that? And so the software helps you read the data in these new ways. So how do you get Quercos? Well, there's a one month free trial that you can download by going to www.quercos.com. And you can get that for Windows, Mac, or Linux. So the best way to learn is to try. So this video will help you go through step by step the different things that you need to do to see that. So let's close that down. And this is what Quercos will look like when you first download and install it onto your computer. So basically you'll get this trial dialogue letting you know how many days are left in your trial. You'll get 21 days by default and you can get an extra week by filling in a feedback form. So I'm just gonna click on the continue trial here button to keep going with the trial version. And you'll see this is the file opening screen here. And this is what shows the projects. Now the projects, we create files that contain all of our sources in them. And you've got a list of the recently used ones here. So we can see this one here called walkthrough. And this location here shows you where you've saved it on your computer. When you're done with one, you can just remove it with that click there. So now I'm gonna create a new project just by clicking on the new project button. You've got a space here to put in your author name or initials. You can password protect it if you need to be working with confidential data. And you can also have structured question project. Now normally you would leave that off but if you're bringing in survey data, so for example from an online survey that you've done then the structured questions means basically you're asking the same open ended questions to each person. And it kind of helps structure the report around that. So let's keep with the default options and click on new project. And then this will just give you the standard kind of location. I'm gonna be messy and leave it on my desktop. So it saves all the data on your computer. The project file is an easy thing for you to move around and back up. So I'll call this webinar example. And just click on the save button. Now this has created a new project for us. Now at this stage you may get an overview screen if it's the first time you've used Quercos that will guide you through what the main buttons do. Just click close if you see that and then you'll get back to this main screen. So you see that Quercos is split in half. On the left side of the screen we have what we call the canvas area and this is where we put the bubbles or the themes which represent interesting things in our text. And on the right side of the screen these are the sources of text that we have. What we're gonna do here is bring in some sources of text that are actually from an example project which you can download from our website. It's just people talking about healthy eating options for breakfast. So you see along here it says click to add source and this button at the top right of the screen this gives you the options for bringing in new sources of text data. So we can import from a file. We can copy and paste. We can bring in CSV, so spreadsheet files from Excel or something else. We can bring in a whole folder of files at once. So I'm just gonna choose select files here. We could also have a blank source if we want to type or amalgamate things together. Now I'll go to the location where I have my data. So that's desktop, example project and then we've got some sources here. Jane, Mabel, Mabarek. So actually we'll bring in all three of those at once. We click there, click open. Three sources have been imported. Okay, so you can see on the right side of the screen now we've got the text and there are these tabs across the top which let us move between the three most recently used sources. And we've got lots of sources in our project. There's this button here which shows a list of all the sources that are in the project. You just click on them to open them that way. So basically you'll see that everything you have along the top here this is to do with the sources. Now below that you'll see there's an option here for the memos which we'll look at in a minute. We can do a text search and you've got two tabs here. One to tab between the text of the project. So here's the actual text which is in our source and here we've got the properties. Now the properties are used to show anything other than the text that we know about the source. So this might be demographic information like age or gender. We can also have comments here. We can do if we're doing a mixed method project we can have discrete data listed in here. So it's very flexible. We can use it in any way. So I'm just gonna click on this little plus button here. It says to quickly add a new property. And we'll call this one age. And this person can be 37 years old. So now we've said that Mabel is 37 years old. If we use the tabs to go to Jane's source here we can say that her age is, well you see we've got 37 there. This dropdown box lets us see what is existing there. We'll just choose another one here, 44. Now the reason we're doing this is that when we've done our coding or when we've done a little bit anyway we can always go back and see the results just by people who are over a certain age or from a certain location or of a certain gender. So it allows us to basically explore the data by any kind of the properties characteristics that we know about our sources. When we're done dealing with the properties and you can put as many of these in as you like they can be long, they can be discreet they can be numerical, they can be text. You have multiple choice categories. But when you're done with those you can just click on this tab here to go back to the text view. So now we can see the text that's in the project. So let's have a little quick look at how we would do some coding. Now one of the things people are talking about in this project is Moosey. So I'm going to start reading through the text of the source so people are saying, okay Siri, okay so that's a good one to start with. Let's click on this button here the big plus button on the side of the canvas that adds a new quirk to the project. So we'll call this one serial. We can put it in a longer description here if you want to. You can change the color. So serial is kind of brown in color. Okay, greeny brown in this case. And you can also assign it to one or two of many groups which we'll look at later. So I click on the save button and you see we've got at a random location this serial bubble. So we can drag to move it around and now that's there to contain all the sources of text that we think are about serial. So if I select a bit of text here this first sentence for example, I usually have serial. So that's about serial. So I'm going to select the text and then drag and drop it onto the bubble. And that's how we add a piece of text to that theme in quirk costs. You'll see we've got color coded stripe here. If we hover the mouse over it, it says serial. If we right click, we can remove it. So that's now no longer associated with serial but we can click on the undo button and we can put that back again. Now let's create another theme here which is milk. I guess we should probably make that white and we'll see. So she's saying I have it with low fat milk. So we may select the whole sentence or just a certain part of it. We'll drag and drop that onto the milk bubble there. So now you can see the stripes show that we've got more than one piece of, this text is associated with more than one theme here. So it's about serial and it's about milk. So we can keep going through and we can say, is that all we have to say about milk? Yes, I think so. So let's go to another theme. Let's go to Mabel. Baby has porridge. I guess that's kind of serial. So let's be, oh and rice crispy. So they're definitely talking about serial. So we'll drag and drop that one to the serial bubble. Ha. And now you can see that now we've started to have a different number of codes on the different themes. The size of the bubbles is showing us how much we've added to each of them. So if we keep adding things to serial, most of the time might see, I'm sorry, I've forgotten for example, you'll see that serial will keep growing relative to milk and the other bubbles on the canvas. So we always get a sense of what's emerging in the data. Now I'm going to show you how we can create some subcategories here. So we've got one here for rice crispies, I can see. So I'm going to drag and drop that onto the plus button and that will add a new property here. A new quirk called, what's called rice crispies. I guess they're kind of whitey yellowy. Now you see we've got a new bubble called rice crispies and that text that we selected and put on the plus button has automatically been added. So if you're creating themes on the go, that's a very quick way to do that. But there is a relationship between serial and rice crispies. I would say that rice crispies is a type of serial and we can show that by dragging this bubble onto the serial bubble and there you'll see we've created a subcategory for rice crispies. We can create another one here for shreddies. There's a brown, is that brown? Sort of. Yeah, that's good enough. And so we can add this piece of text here which is about shreddies to the shreddies bubble and we can drag and drop the shreddies bubble onto serial. And now if we want to add some more text onto that, you just put onto the topmost bubble first and then the others will pop out and then you can add it to the second one. So you can see that we've started to add different things here. And now all you need to do to see all the text from all of the sources that you've added to one of these themes, you just double click on the bubble and it shows you this exploded view of all the subcategories here and on the right we've got all of the different pieces of text which are from any of these themes. We just want to see what people have said about rice crispies. We can click on that, okay? And it'll also show you here the properties. So 100% of the people who talked about rice crispies were 37 years old and that was one person. So there's more information available there should you need that in the future. So I'm going to click on the home button here. I'm going to show you how you can use the search function to help doing this coding. So this little magnifying glass button here brings open the search bar. And if we put in a word like milk, we can see here all the places across all the different sources in the project where people mentioned milk. I can select a piece of text from there, drag and drop it onto the bubble. So that's milk, there's skim milk there. So now I've put much more on with milk. Now the thing to bear in mind is that there is a risk with trying to code like this where you're just using the search words. The problem is that you can only see exactly that word. So if somebody uses a slightly different word then you won't pick up on that. So it's important to read through the text anyway and make sure you get everything. But there is a synonyms database built in here. So if we put in something like hate and turn on the synonyms database, then what we'll see is we can also search for detest and hatred, okay, that was a pretty specific term. And if that appears anywhere in the project, does it? Oh, ha ha, whatever, so there's hate within there. But you've got options there to refine and expand the search if you need to do that. So I'm gonna close the search results by clicking on the little red cross next to the magnifying glass there and go back to the main source of the text. Now, if we want to comment on something here, we can also drag and drop onto this column here which is the memos column. And that allows us to put in kind of like a sticky note thing and we can type in here something, one of our observations. So we might say forgotten because there was not enough time. So you can write as many comments as you like and you'll see those in any of the reports and exports. And that's a good idea if you want to kind of keep track of your comments or suggestions or things that people, you're reading into what people are saying. And clicking on any of these things will also select that text. You can kind of code directly from the memos as well. If you're doing something like IPA or in vivo coding where you're using the words of participants to frame the codes. So I'm gonna use this little memo button here to turn off the memos. This is basically the stage where you would keep going through all of your data, you read through all of your sources, you assign as much of it as you want to new themes as you like, so it's coffee. And you basically just keep going until you're happy with your interpretation. This might take days if you've got a lot of semi-structured interviews or something like that to go through. And then when you've done all that, there are various tools in Quercos that will help you see more information about it. So let's cheat here and let's open an existing project where we've already done the coding. So this is the same project. And again, you can download this example. And we've done a lot of coding here about breakfast. So basically we've got what people like and dislike and healthy options and so on. And if we double click on breakfast items, we can see all the different things that people have for breakfast. Home button always takes us back to this main screen. And then if we look at, and we can look to see what things occur together. It's probably a good first step to exploring the data. So we've said like, we've coded lots of piece of text about like and probably something else as well. So if we right click on any of the bubbles, we'll be able to edit them, do other things with them. So let's choose this overlap view here. And what this does is shows us a kind of, like a Venn diagram. So the closer the bubbles are to the center, they more overlap. So the thing that people have said that they like most was actually the healthy options for food. So that's pretty great. So if I click on the healthy bubble there, it will show us, well, there's actually only three. Yes, three overlapping codes, but these are the pieces of text where people have talked about that they like something and we've tagged it as being healthy. And we can see those on the right here. We've got these two slightly not quite overlapping bits about healthy. We can do that for any of the themes and bubbles in here. Now you remember, we also had the query. We also had those properties that we had. And with the query button, we can see what's going on there. So if we click, okay, this will do property. We can change the property thing here, but we'll have gender, we've got age, we've got city. We'll have gender equals male. And then we'll click update to run the query. You can see on the left, here's everything that people, all the men said in the project about what they like. But we can also split the screen and then see everything that the women like. And we can see that the women talk about liking toast a lot more than men. Now, those are just absolute numbers. And if we're doing a proper qualitative project, we should go back to the text and read what it says to see if there is a reason for these differences. And then very may well be. And if we're interested in these quotes, what we can do is we can select all of them or just some of them here. Then we can copy them and then paste them into words. So we have these quotes. We have the extract of what source they came from. Then we can start to write a report or an article or a dissertation around those. So we click on the home button again. And let's look at some of the ways that we can export the data for the project. So we see there's a big export button here. If we click on that, we can create a word cloud. Let's have a quick look at that. The word cloud helps you see how often words appear in the project. So we can alter this in other ways. We can save these. These are usually kind of fun. So people are saying usually quite a lot. They're pretty uncertain, but breakfast comes up there. Toast comes up a lot. It's not so bright. So we can look through those and we can save images from them. We've also got full reports that you can create. Now these have got all the kind of detailed information of everything you've done in the project. Who did what, action and when. So on the left, we've got preview of the report. So we can see here's all the themes that we have in there and how many codes are associated to each of them. And there's a graph of the properties of our respondents. We've got pictures here of the canvas which we can drag and drop into word or PowerPoint. And then we've got the text, all the text from each thing. With these options on the right, we can change how they are displayed. So we can have all the quotes from one person instead of all the quotes from one source. And we can also do various things like show the properties of where these quotes are coming from. So this is Sarah and she's 22 from Edinburgh and female. So there's a lot more options here. And when you've got the report the way you like it, you can say this is a word file, so you can edit it more. You can say there's a PDF to send to someone or as a web page or just just print it out. You've also got the option here to create a word document. So if we do that, oops. You've got a standard word file here. And basically it's got all of your coding shown as color coded highlights using the comment system. So you can print this out and share with anyone who's got a word like your supervisor and they can see how you've done the coding and disagree with you if they want. And you've also got the option here to export as a spreadsheet data as well. So that's a very basic overview of Quercos, the basic operations and what you can do with it. If you've got any questions, just get in contact with us. We're always happy to show you around any other part of it.