Stable Version

LibreQDA is developed by the Plateforme en humanités numériques at Université de Sherbrooke as an updated version of the Taguette research tool developed by Rémi Rampin et al. LibreQDA is not an independent “fork” of Taguette.

Both projects are free, open-source qualitative research tools that can be used to accomplish specific steps in the analysis of interviews or other corpuses:

Importing a variety of text files (.pdf, .docx, .odt, .txt and more)
Coding words, sentences or paragraphs using codes manually set by the user
Finding and analyzing themes of interest
Exporting a subset of coded selections or the project as a whole

The server side of LibreQDA is hosted on Calcul Québec supercomputers and administered by highly qualified university staff. Users can simply connect using a web browser and their work is automatically saved in real time.

Changes

LibreQDA has made improvements to several existing functions of Taguette and added others in order to strengthen the overall functioning of computer-assisted qualitative research methods, according to two key objectives:

Promoting the adoption of free and open-source software that helps with the core operations involved in computer-assisted qualitative data analyses.
Promoting use cases that are aligned with the principles of sound research data management

The following improvements were developed in collaboration with qualitative data analysis specialists:

Secure authentication using the CILogon service, which works with digital identity providers from around the world (server version only)
Uploading multiple documents at once
Selecting different colours for codes
Overlaid coding stripes
A hierarchical classification of codes
Drag-and-drop functionality for quick coding
Displaying coded extracts that respond to given criteria
Moving directly to a selected extract
Search engine