Here are my slides from my presentation calling for qualitative researchers to embrace open source software and my work on Pythia – an open source QDAS written in Python. This presentation was part of the Urban Studies’ Monday Workshops at the University of Glasgow.
Abstract:
Qualitative data analysis software (QDAS) has the potential to revolutionise both the scale of qualitative research and the array of possible analysis techniques. Yet currently available software still imposes unnecessary limits that hinder and prevent this full potential from being realised. Additionally, it locks data and the analysis performed on it within proprietary file formats that makes the archiving and sharing of research difficult. Due to similar issues, open source solutions have seen increasing popularity in quantitative research, and it is perhaps time that qualitative researchers joined them. This presentation will therefore discuss both the issues of current proprietary QDAS as well as the potential of open source software for qualitative researchers. To do this, the myriad of issues experienced with NVivo by the Welfare Conditionality project will be used to exemplify the problems created by a reliance on expensive, slow, and poorly designed proprietary software. The second half of the presentation will focus on Pythia, an open source QDAS library written in Python I have been working on. Through covering the design philosophy, current progress, and long-term plans the potential of open source will be highlighted for being able to solve problems with current qualitative software, enable new creative analysis techniques, and allow researchers to reclaim control of their data.