Qualitative Data Analysis

A spin on the phrase "tag it!", Taguette is a free and open source qualitative research tool (which works on all operating systems!). With Taguette, users can import PDFs, Word Docs (.docx), Text files (.txt), HTML, EPUB, MOBI, Open Documents (.odt), and Rich Text Files (.rtf).

After uploading documents, users can highlight words, sentences, or paragraphs and tag them with the codes you create. All the work you do in Taguette is completely exportable, including tagged documents, codebooks, highlights for a specific tag, highlights for all tags, and a list of tags with their descriptions.

Users can upload documents in any language to Taguette. The interface is currently available in English (US), French, German, Italian, and Spanish. You can find more information about using Taguette via the getting started guide and FAQ.

You can install Taguette on your own computer with instructions and files from https://taguette.org/install.html.

If you need to collaborate on your qualitative project, you can use the free online server maintained by the developers of Taguette at https://app.taguette.org.

Once you have installed Taguette, or logged onto app.taguette.org, you will see a page that greets you as the admin and has a button to Create a project. Click that button and you'll be prompted to enter a Title and Description for your new project. This can be changed later on if you want.

Upon clicking Create, you'll be taken the Project View, which has a left and a right pane. The left pane contains the information about your project information ('Project Info'), uploaded materials ('Documents'), and tags ('Highlights') as tabs. You can go between these tabs as you like. The right pane will render documents and will be the area where you'll do the highlighting and tagging.

To get an idea of how to work in Taguette, let's upload a document and get you tagging! In the left pane, click on the Documents tab. You should see a button that says Add a document. Click that and pick just one document from your computer, either a: .pdf, .docx, .txt, .odt, .md, or .html. Just one file to be uploaded. You'll be prompted to give the new document a Name (should be something human-readable, required) and Description (like a note about the file, optional). When you have picked a document and at least given it a name, click the Import button. You should then see that file immediately in the Documents tab. If not, just refresh the page and it should be shown then.

Taguette ships with one existing tag (or codes, if you're familiar with qualitative research): interesting. This is just there to get you started -- you can add and remove tags as often as you'd like! To view all your existing tags, click the Highlights tab in the left pane. You should see a list of existing tags for the project - again, if you haven't added any yet, you will still see interesting. To add your own tags to this project, click Create a tag. You will get a popup asking you for the Name and Description of the tag you want to create:

Now that you have some tags, you can highlight! Once uploaded, you should see the document in the 'Documents' tab. Click on it and you should see the contents of your document in the right pane. Once you see the text in the right pane, we can start highlighting it! Select some text by left-clicking and dragging it over the text you'd like to highlight. Once you let go of your left-click, a pop-up that says new highlight will appear next to the highlighted text.

Click that pop-up, and you will get a list of existing tags from which to choose. You can select one or more tags to apply to the highlighted text.