[Air-L] Dedoose (Qual & Mixed Methods Web Research App) Updates

[Jason Taylor]

Hello everyone, it's been quite a while since we posted about Dedoose, and wanted to let everyone know about some of the major updates over the past few months.  For those not aware of Dedoose, Dedoose is a web-based application for qualitative and mixed methods researchers designed by Drs. Thomas Wiesner and Eli Lieber of UCLA's Center for Culture and Health after years of frustration with NVivo, MaxQDA, and other software.     You can find out more on our site over at http://www.dedoose.com.  Here are some of the major new features over the past few months:

 - Full code import, export, and code merging.  Continuing our tradition of easy-in easy-out, you can now export and import codes, along with merging codes together merging the code applications at the same time.  We now have full exporting of all Data in your project.  If for some reason Dedoose does not fit your needs, your free to take your data elsewhere.  We stand by the fact that we believe we are the best at what we do, and it's our responsibility to our users to keep being the best.  We promise never to lock in users like many of our competitors do.

 - Training Center for inter-rater reliability testing both for code application and code weighting.  We are using Cohen's Kappa and Pearson's Correlation for tests respectively.  This works great for an individual researchers testing their accuracy over time, or for groups of researching to verify consistency of application and/or weighting.   

- Chat system: Now chat in real-time with any member of your project using Dedoose.

- The Advanced Project Importer: Got an excel spreadsheet with a ton of quantitative and qualitative data and want to create a Dedoose project?  Using our advanced importer Dedoose with automatically create all the descriptor fields, descriptors, documents, excerpts, codes, and link everything together at once completing what we call the indexing phase of your study.  Simply add more codes and apply them to the excerpts and then begin your analysis.

- Insane performance increases:  Over the course of the past few months users have been pushing Dedoose well beyond what we initially believed where "normal" studies, especially with quantitative researchers trying Dedoose.   We enjoy a good challenge as at the end of the day it only makes us greater.  Our engineering team has stepped up to the challenge in a big way optimizing so many different pieces of Dedoose.  We are seeing large projects load over 10x faster, over 30x reduction in memory usage, and the ability to store 20x more data per project.  In one example one of our projects is holding over 750,000 individual descriptor field values, and is loading smoothly.

- Complex filtering:  We implemented the ability to select multiple filters across categories allowing the very intuitive and easy creation of complex and/or Boolean logic filters.  This makes it very easy for example to find all excerpts with  3 particular codes with specific weights that also happen to be linked to a particular descriptor field option ( for example females).

- Full .doc support:  In addition to rtf, txt, docx, we have added support for the older Microsoft office format .doc, including embedded images.   We also have found great tools to automatically batch convert from pdf's to docs, allowing full use of PDF's as well.

- Payment and Pricing changes: We have simplified our pricing, turned on month-by-month pay as you go, as well as added additional discounts for paying for 6, or 12 month terms.  In addition we are fully willing to beat any competitors price in any situation.

These is just a small sample, for more check out our blog over at http://www.dedoose.com/blog and our forum over at http://www.dedoose.com/forum

We are wrapping up some additional feature improvements over the next few weeks, and then going headfirst into brining in video and audio into Dedoose.

For those that haven't tried Dedoose, it's free and instant to sign up, no credit card or billing information required at sign up.  After a month you are prompted to pay, but are allowed to hide the dialog for a while after that.  This gives you the chance to export out any work from Dedoose you like in case you don't want to continue your trial, but we are pretty sure Dedoose will meet your needs :-P

Happy Coding
~ Jason Taylor
   Dedoose Lead Developer