Hey all, as of midnight 1/31/2012 Dedoose video support will be live!

Sorry for the 8 hour time warp as suggested by the title and based on the timing of this post, but we needed this up for other reasons….like a good night’s sleep.

In any case, the culmination of perhaps our tech team’s most daunting task to date has arrived and works beautifully.  It is almost impossible to describe the challenges involved in providing a web-based, interactive, functional, and rapid-response system for excerpting, coding, analyzing, and retrieving video in Dedoose.  A path navigated with incredible creativity, determination, and innovation has been traveled and we are delighted to put the results into the hands of Dedoose users.  You just have to see it to believe it, and you can now in our video tutorial video (sorry, couldn’t resist) that was just posted on YouTube (click here).

If you are already familiar with Dedoose functionality and features, there is surprisingly little to say except that you can essentially now do with video media everything you’ve been doing with textual media.  Via the intuitive video viewer interface, you can quickly move throughout the video time-line, play portions, create and code any number of video excerpts, memo, link to descriptors, …  As for analysis, the video excerpts are represented, reviewed, recoded, and viewed in context via the same mechanisms as textual excerpts.

Since we were hoping for an early January release for video support, we truly appreciate your patience on the timing.  If you missed our December newsletter, the major migration to our new server home was huge and truly necessary for the infrastructure that has been put in place to accommodate the video support.  For the first time in our 13 year history, Dedoose (previously EthnoNotes) services were fully off-line as the team worked frantically to navigate the migration and assure all the details were in place.  As anticipated, the result is a tremendously stronger and broader foundation for delivering the current Dedoose services, enhancing system performance, and for our future feature and user-base expansion.  Finally, to follow in short time will be support for independent audio resources and then fully integrated and linked transcripts for video and audio and enhanced analysis features for these new media.

As always, please feel free to keep sending comments and suggestions to us at support@dedoose.com.  We are greatly encouraged by regular and positive user feedback and all requests for new and enhanced features are given serious consideration.

Cheers for now,

Eli, Jason and Team Dedoose

Hey all, just a quick note on what we’ve been up to lately…LOTS.

The last couple of months have been a whirlwind of conference sponsorships and meeting attendance for Dedoose and the feedback has been terrific.  First up was an outstanding opportunity presented by the Oregon Program Evaluators Network (OPEN) in Portland.  This audience has been focusing on mixed method research and so it is a perfect match for Dedoose.  Eli ran a two-part hands-on workshop, ‘ Dedoose: Innovative Online Tools for Qualitative and Mixed Methods Evaluation Research.’  Terrific attendance and Dedoose was immediately adopted by many who attended.

Our next stop was the meeting of the 17^th Qualitative Health Research Conference in Vancouver hosted by the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology.  A great audience for Dedoose and a nice location with the sponsor area being located central to all activity.  Our own public health research experience helped us really connect with interested researchers from all over the world.

Then there was the Annual meeting of the American Evaluation Association in Anaheim, CA. right in our own neighborhood. Much like the Portland meeting this group was another ideal Dedoose audience. It was exiting to hear about all the unsolicited highlighting of Dedoose by a number of presenters discussing advanced in data visualization, collaborative research, and cloud-based solutions.

Finally, we just returned from Montreal from the 110^th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association.  We heard a number of ‘wow’s’ and ‘WHAT!’ when people heard about Dedoose being Mac computer friendly, having low monthly fees, and that we only charge for actual Dedoose use.  ‘Yeah, we’re not like NetFlix where you pay whether you watch movies or not….pretty fair, huh?’  This meeting feels like a real turning point with solid positive attention from prominent researchers like H. Russell Bernard.  Further, we’re seeing great uptake from users who had not previously used any software for their qualitative or mixed method data analysis.  This suggests Dedoose is cracking into a brand new arena and the accelerative rate of sign-ups is very promising.

Happy Holiday Season to everyone and we’ll be back at you after we catch up on some sleep,

Eli and the Dedoose Team

Dedoose – Great Research Made Easy – and Now on your Tablet!

We are thrilled about the recent release of Dedoose for the tablet.  Currently only for Android devices, but the Apple App is coming very soon…check it out at the Android Market

This version is a port of the Dedoose web application and is intended to be a convenient mobile companion—but not a replacement for the web/desktop version of Dedoose.  While feature complete, a fairly powerful Android tablet device (an IPad version is coming very soon)  is required for a solid performance experience and we’d recommend nothing smaller than a 9 inch screen.  However, this application will let you access your project data, charts, and more and all remotely.

Can you find a Dedoose user near you?

Ask around…Dedoose is still new to many, but with thousands of users spanning the U.S. and in over 40 countries world-wide, chances are there is someone close to you who has discovered the wonders of what Dedoose offers for the success of their qualitative and mixed method research.   Dedoose is a set of online tools for qualitative and mixed method data analysis.  Ideal for managing, coding, exploring, and analyzing qualitative and, optionally for mixed method analysis, integrating the quantitative data that you’ve collected from your research participants—demographics, scale scores, responses to survey questions, etc.  Once in Dedoose, you’ll begin exploring your data through Dedoose’s plethora of interactive data visualizations to discover rich and deep patterns hidden within your data.

So What Else is New?

• Enhanced Project Importer-if you’ve used Atlas.ti, NVivo, SurveyMonkey, or any other software that exports your data, our support team can re-create your project in Dedoose for no cost.
• Project Merging-bring together all the work from multiple Dedoose projects
• Document Export-a long awaited feature to export documents to MS Word with excerpts highlighted and all applied codes visible as attached comments.
• Memo System Upgrade-the memo system is more flexible than ever with the freedom to link to locations in documents and an undated and more powerful management interface.
• Pay Only When You Play-we only charge when you use Dedoose…so you can take advantage of discounts for longer terms and for any month you don’t access Dedoose the funds simply roll forward.

 What are They Saying?

Appreciative comments arrive regularly and we never thought Dedoose would make someone ‘squeal,’ but here are a few that struck us recently, thanks and keep them coming:

‘It’s not uncommon during my weekly research team teleconferences to hear someone squeal “Dedoose can already do that?  Cool!”  Better and better…’

‘I am SO glad that you have created this software. I am pleased that you have taken the initiative to make this software easy and accessible to use.  Big win over [a major competitor] for sure…Keep up the great work!’

‘I’ve been waiting for something decent to use for years now.’

‘You did an amazing job with the software.  I will do my best to spread the word.’

‘The filters and charts work great!  Your prompt response to customer questions saves lives!  Thank you!!!…you are so awesome!’

OK, back to the grind, stay tuned for more and please help by ‘liking’ us on Facebook and spreading the good word on Dedoose…You users are our most valuable advocates.

Cheers,

Eli, Tom, Jason, and the entire Dedoose Team

P.S. Here’s a link to our mixed method article of the month.

Dear Dedoose Users (and future users),

After some serious head scratching, we’ve come up with and implemented what we feel is an elegant solution to exporting documents showing all excerpting activity and coding.  The big challenge came from the many ways Dedoose users do their work.  Imagine a document with many overlapping excerpts and many (and long titled) codes attached to each.  What would that look like upon an export to Word or PDF?  Finally, it came to us!  Simply take advantage of the comments built into the Word review menu…sorry it took so long and the solution was right in our faces.

So, now you will find the ubiquitous Dedoose ‘export’ icon in the panel header when viewing a document.  Click to export and save.  When you open the document in Word, you’ll automatically be in ‘review’ mode, all excerpt text will be highlighted, and anywhere codes where applied there will be a comment in the margin that lists the code names and any weights that were applied.  This was a long awaited and often asked for feature and we are delighted to announce its arrival.

And, briefly, since thing surrounding Dedoose are really heating up, we are planning a number of road trips…hope you’ll find us:

• August 20th-23rd, Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, NV for the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association
• October 7th, World Trade Center, Portland, OR for the annual meeting of the Oregon Program Evaluators Network, 2011:Evaluation in Society
• November 2nd-5th, Hilton Hotel, Anaheim, CA for the annual meeting of the American Evaluation Association
• November 16th-20th, Montreal Convention Center, Montreal, Quebec Canada for the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Assocation

Hope you enjoy the latest Dedoose updates and will look forward to meeting you at any of the upcoming events.

Eli and the Dedoose Team

Hey Dedoose Community,

Perhaps better than reading on, you can check all the new stuff in action in a short YouTube video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgvIVmGH6p0.

But, here are the highlights:

• Descriptor Auto-Grouper for Continuous Variable Charting
• Data Synchronization for Simultaneous Users
• Integrated Help Center
• Chi-Square Calculation for Descriptor Cross-Tab Chart
• Consolidated Charts
• User Controls for Adding Project
• and a bunch of little fixes and enhancements

Previously, all Dedoose charts were generated from categorical descriptor variables (List-Type Fields).  For example, charting the applications of various codes against gender (male/female).  Now, you have the ability to chart against numerical and date/time variables.  Our upgraded charting engine is powered by a fantastic algorithm that looks at the data used, breaks it up into categories based on the distribution of cases across the range of the variable, and then generates charts based on these groupings.  This upgrade has been applied to EVERY chart in Dedoose so every descriptor variable can be incorporated in the mixed-methods data visualization and analysis.

Data Synchronization–when users are working simultaneously they sometimes had to re-load Dedoose to see the work of others working elsewhere.  No longer!  Click the data synchronization button to immediately update all project data without needing to leave the application.

Similarly, you’ll find a fully integrated help center inside Dedoose too.  So rather than go to the website for the tutorial videos, user guide, FAQs, and support request form, all are now directly accessible within the application for immediate access.

Descriptor field by descriptor field (Cross-Tabs) charts, now calculates a Chi-Square statistic and you’ll find all you need to determine if the relationship is statistically significant.

Many related charts are now consolidated so you can swap between code frequency and code weighting chart with the simple click of the toggle rather than needing to call up and specify an independent chart.

Want a new project?  Enter your ‘Projects’ workspace, click the ‘+’ sign in the upper right corner of the pop-up, enter a title and description, and your new project is ready for use without your needing to see administrative assistance.

Those are the biggies, but there are a few other enhancements and fixes.  For example:

• Code Tree Order Controls
• Excerpt lister now is now saving column and sorting options
• Memo exporting selector now retains vertical scroll position upon selection
• Exporting excerpts from chart selector now, always, saving file extension on windows machines hiding file extensions.

Enjoy, and, as always, keep the feedback  coming so we can continue improving Dedoose for everyone.

~ Eli, Tom, and JT

Hey all, we’ve been a bit quite on the blog lately, but it’s been quite the opposite here at Dedoose Central.  Here are the most recent noteworthy developments and thanks for all the requests and suggestions that are coming in directly and via our increasingly active forum….read on for more details:

• New Server
• Code Cloud
• Sub-Code (Child Code) Count Options
• Descriptor by Code App Chart
• Chart Selection (Excerpt List) Filtering
• Security Center and Training Center Video Tutorials

1. Most exciting for our development team was our recent move to a terrific new server.  We’d been planning this for a while as we saw our user-base growing, but we actually ‘missed it by that much.’  Took roughly a month to get it all set up and about 12 hours before we hit the switch we maxed out on our old system resources.  Sorry for anyone that got caught in that special moment, but we are now zipping away on the new server and ready to keep growing.  Certainly a good problem to have from a company growth perspective, but our service to all of you is the most important thing we do, so it’s all good now (and for some time to come) and the system performance is rocking.
2. If you’ve logged into Dedoose lately, you are sure to have seen the hot code cloud that is now present on your project home dashboard.  Informative, fun to play with, and, of course, interactive.  The code name colors and size reflect the relative application rates and click a code to easily pull up all associated excerpts.
3. Sub-code counts are now included by default in all tables and charts.  This means that all counts reflected in bars and cells include both the parent code counts and all applications of any the codes children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren … Simply turn off this option to view only the counts for the immediate code in question.
4. A new descriptor by code application chart that is basically the flip side of the code apps by descriptor charts.  Select a code and Dedoose generates a set of charts for each descriptor that shows the relative use of the code for each descriptor sub-group.
5. Some nice internal enhancements to the Training Center that speed test creation for really big tests with lots of codes and we hope people are taking advantage of the feature.
6. All chart selection reviewer lists (we sometimes call excerpt lists)—the pop-up you get whenever clicking a feature in a chart or table to view the underlying excerpts—can now be used to quickly define and activate a filter.  So, for example, in our demo project let’s say I click the ‘Spanish’ slice of the ‘Reading Language’ descriptor ratio pie chart.  What I get is the review panel with all excerpts assigned to families who predominantly read in Spanish to their children.  In the panel I can now click the ‘Make Active Set’ button which serves to filter the data set to only the Spanish reading households and all subsequent analyses will only be on those cases until I enter the ‘Select Data’ workspace and clear the current set.  Convenient AND powerful and you can always enter the Select Data workspace to apply additional filter criteria.

That’s all the big development activity and we’re locking this in as version 3.  A few little bits and pieces will come online this week and then we are happily cutting the team lose to attack the video support that we think will come online by mid to late summer….that’s a biggie so stay tuned.  Finally, we’ve a gorgeous new website going up by next week that will include all the new video tutorials and security language.  For now, the Training Center (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_o6MGqLDUA) and Security Center (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN_fL5g49js) tutorials are up on YouTube so you can tap those resource immediately as we work to get the new site wrapped up.

Cheers,

Eli

Dedoose Training Center Video Tutorial

Dedoose Security Center Video Tutorial

Although we have been posting these details on the forum, it’s been a while since we updated the blog.  We’ve made some major structural changes to Dedoose on the backend that has once again boosted performance dramatically.   Large projects are seeing a massive increase is load times,  our main large test project loads in about 9 seconds now instead of ~45!     Additionally we’ve been getting a lot of request from QSR International’s NVivo users to be able to use their data inside Dedoose.   Many NVivo users have asked us if migration is possible and our crack team has found a solution and built an NVivo export strategy that can export your entire project’s data into a giant excel spreadsheet with the codes or nodes applied to every segment, and, upon import to Dedoose, re-links these coded excerpts to their source document.   As part of the overall mission, we built two different Dedoose project importers, one that can handle a spreadsheet and documents like the NVivo example and one that can handle a spreadsheet like what most survey tools output (all inspired by research using SurveyMonkey).  This being said, it’s now possible to get your data into Dedoose from just about any source including NVivo, MaxQDA, Atlas.ti, Survey Monkey, and just about anything else you can generate a spreadsheet from.  If your project includes both qualitative and quantitative data, like some research with SurveyMonkey with both scale and open-ended questions, the importer will do something amazing work.   Upon import, the importer analyzes all values to determine which columns are numbers, dates, true/false, multiple choice, etc.  It then creates the proper descriptor fields for this data, create the descriptors, creates a transcript for every record with question/answer for each qualitative data column in the output, creates a tag/code for that question, creates an excerpt for each question/answer in each transcript, applies the tag for that question, and also links the appropriate quantitative information (descriptor).    In one fell swoop it complete’s what we refer as the indexing phase of a study, all you need to do now is create additional qualitative codes/tags, apply them to the existing excerpts and begin your analysis….or just start your analysis immediately using your descriptor data and indexed qualitative responses!

These imports need to be processed by our engineering team, so if you are interested please email support@dedoose.com and we will be happy to assist.

At the same time, we’ve had our team members working on improving other aspects of Dedoose, and will be releasing a slew of updates shortly.  One of the more interesting aspects are a complete re-write of the charting system.   As we have optimized so many aspects of Dedoose, it appears that the remaining major draw on system resources are attributable to the interactive charts.   After our team has re-built them for performance we are once again seeing incredible performance increases, for example the slowest chart: Tag Co-Occurrence on one large data set takes about 2-3 minutes to fully render all cells, compare that to about 6 seconds in our new optimized versions for a full 30x speed increase.  In addition these new charts use a fraction of the memory, and offer customization that was not possible in our previous generation, such as the selection of different coloring routines.

As usual our team has been cranking out tons of bug fixes, performance enhancements, feature improvements, and requested features.  Stay tuned here, or check out the forum to keep up-to-date, keep an eye out for a slew of new video tutorials, and, coming very soon, a brand new look for our website.

Happy Coding!

Hey all, HUGE update to Dedoose yesterday!  So substantial, you’ll note we’re moving on to Dedoose 2.0.

Bottom line is that over the last few months we’ve been building our wish list (again) and we’ve been listening carefully to the needs of all the Dedoose users.  Video support and editable documents are our next major directions,  but we feel this update addresses the vast majority of new feature wishes and some terrific performance enhancements.

Lot’s to report here, but hang in and I’ll bet there is something you’ll be glad to read about:

Code merging—if you ever find you’ve used two codes independently and then decide to merge that work, we’ve got you covered.

1. Enter code tree editing
2. Float over and choose to edit the code you want to merge into another
3. Click ‘Merge’
4. Select the ‘Primary Code’ you want to merge the ‘Secondary’ code into
5. Submit

That’s it…and all the code applications you’ve done with either code are now represented in the coding associated with the primary code.

Excerpt Creator and Creation Date Tips—when you float over a bracket in a document, you will see the character position and the codes applied AND the name of the user who created the excerpt and the date it was created.

Document Font Size Control—eyes getting tired?  No worries, you will now find ‘Font Size’ controls in the lower right corner of a document viewing panel.  Arrow UP to enlarge the font, arrow DOWN to shrink, easy.

Descriptor Field Value Ordering—you can now adjust the order that field values are presented in all the Dedoose charts.  Previously, the presentation of the value order was based on frequency.  Now, you can edit the order of Descriptor Field values and this user-controlled order will be retained for all subsequent presentations.  Ex. change the order of ‘Ethnicity’ from African American, Asian, Caucasian, Latino to Latino, African American, Asian, Caucasian and that’s the way they would show up in all your charts.

SuperMegaGrid Filter Enhancement = Complex Filtering —some users, for example, wanted to narrow their excerpt list to only those with all of 3, 4, 5, … codes and maybe other characteristics too.  Great idea…done!  This is a somewhat more advanced analysis feature, but extremely useful when you understand its power.  Filtering and sorting in any of our custom Dedoose SuperMegaGrids, we hope, is pretty straight-forward.  In the Columns section you can select what fields you want to view in the data grid.  In the Filter section you can narrow the records in view based on particular criteria.  For example, here’s how it might work for you in our demo project—everybody has one of these:

1. Enter the ‘Excerpts’ work space by clicking the ‘Excerpts’ icon in the Dedoose main menu bar
2. In the Columns panel on the left side, click ‘Uncheck All’
3. In the same Columns panel, open ‘Fields’ folder and click the check boxes next to ‘Home Language’ and ‘Child Sex’
4. Again in the Columns panel, open the ‘Codes’ Folder and click the check boxes next to In the ‘Reading by PC’ and ‘Reading Frequency’…at this point you will see all these columns AND you’ll see that a folder for each has appeared in the lower-left ‘Filtering’ section
5. In the ‘Filtering’ section, open the ‘Reading by PC’ folder and click the check box next to ‘true’
6. Open the ‘Reading Frequency’ folder and click the ‘true (5/7)’ and ‘true (7/7)’ check boxes
7. Open the ‘Home Language’ folder and click the check boxes next to ‘Bilingual’ and ‘English’
8. Finally, open the ‘Child Sex’ folder and click the check box next to ‘Male’

So, here’s what we’ve just done.  Step by step, we’ve narrowed our list of excerpts to only those that meet the following criteria…based on the filtering steps above, we now have excerpts that:

1. (step 5) Were coded with the ‘Reading by PC’ code
2. (step 6) AND were also coded with the ‘Reading Frequency’ code AND had a rating of 5 (of 7 days/week) OR 7 (of 7 days/week)—but NOT (2 of 7 days/week)
3. (step 7) AND came from families that reported being either ‘Bilingual’ OR ‘English’ speakers at home
4. (step AND had ‘Male’ children as the study target child.

Pretty complex, but allows for the definition of a very fine level filter and now I could simply export the remaining records and go weave my story.

Excerpt Text Dynamically Loads—by loading excerpt text on demand (as opposed to loading it all when first entering a project) we’ve seen tremendous gains in performance.   90% of the data downloaded when first loading a relatively large project was attributable to the excerpt text.  This is now essentially 0% with no noticeable impact of the rest of what you experience in Dedoose.

Drag and Drop Codes in Training Center—now both the ‘double-click’ and ‘drag and drop’ approach works for adding codes to excerpts in the Training Center.

Cross-Tabs Chart (Descriptor field by Descriptor field) Added—our first pure quantitative chart.

Overlapping Excerpt Text to Red—all text in overlapping excerpt will be highlighted in red, rather than the color change from sub-section to sub-section.  The brackets are still the clearest way to isolate and examine specific excerpts, but this change will be easier on the eye.

Memo Folder Memory—a small and important fix that retains the folder information when editing existing memos…previously, if the memo was in a sub-folder, it would revert to the root folder upon submitting an edit so you would have had to re-specify the folder of choice.

AND,  as always, please let us know about your experience, we value user feedback immensely.

Our Best,

The Dedoose Team

We just updated Dedoose, and though it is a small update, it contains some significant developments.  Mainly we have now integrated code exporting and importing, thereby enabling full exporting and import of all data in Dedoose.  We will very shortly be adding an export button to the project workspace enabling a 1 click export of all project data within Dedoose.  Sometime in the near future we hope to add a import project, along with the existing copy project functionality we already have in place.     Here are some other related fixes and improvements of late:

• Site QA’ed against FireFox and Internet Explorer 7, now should be fully compatible.
• Issue fixed regarding users receiving a multiple user login dialog while only logged in on a single machine.
• Excerpt Lister Document filtering now working correctly.
• Excerpt Lister Code filtering now working correctly.
• Added an outline to weighted tags, now able to see which tags are weighted easily.
• Added a drop down tree selector for all tag selectors in all charts.

That marks the current build, stay tuned as we are ramping up for some MAJOR enhancements to Dedoose.

~ JT

If it hasn’t become clear already, the new Dedoose memo system has been online for a couple of weeks and the feedback is fantastic.  With some terrific guidance from Silvana di Gregorio, we are confident the system is transparent, flexible, and can be used for a variety of uses including: the analytic memos common in grounded theory research, code system development, within group communication, instructor guidance…just about anything you can imagine.  Memos are organized in a typical folder system and can be free floating, linked to excerpts, codes, documents, or descriptors, and can be linked to any number of project-wide objects.

Check it out and, as always, let us know if you have any ideas about how we can improve on the system.