Jerry Hong & Prabhas Pokharel
In the past year, we've heard about several common pain points and feature requests pertaining to tagging, managing tags, and the overall process of synthesizing qualitative data using Reduct. Many researchers have wanted to add some structure to their synthesis by adding hierarchy to tagging, or pre-creating lightweight codebooks before embarking on synthesis. For those doing synthesis in teams, the need to have a shared common language is critical — tags aren't very useful if different people tag the same concept differently!
To respond to this, we've introduced a few features that we hope allows you to add just enough structure to your synthesis process.
Codebook sidebar: If you click on the 📖 icon on the top-left of the transcript page, you'll see a new codebook sidebar. This is a permanent list of your tags, quickly accessible as you are tagging your recordings. Once you add groups and descriptions to your tags (see below), these will also appear in the codebook:
Tag management: Click "Manage Tags" to get to a dedicated space to add groups and descriptions to your tags, quickly sort tags, and even create tags that aren't part of any highlight yet. The "Manage Tags" button is on the codebook sidebar or the highlights page.
A revamped Tag Picker: Once you've added descriptions and groups to your tags, they will also show up when you are highlighting and tagging transcripts. (Including via type-ahead — type a word in the group or description, and we'll surface the corresponding tag.)
Our hope is that these features help your team use the same tags, whether it's just you coming back to tag after a week away, or multiple team members synthesizing your recordings altogether In fact, we hope that the ability to organize a common tag language actually enables you to do collaborative synthesis with your stakeholders, even if it's not a part of your practice today.
Here are some reasons a common tagging language might help your work in Reduct: