When performing qualitative research, good software can be essential. This can be the case when you are working with interview transcripts, focus group notes, survey responses or digitised historical documents. The software discussed here aims at making it easier for you to code your data, and retrieve relevant sections when performing your analysis.
In order to support researchers, the VUB provides licenses for both NVivo and MAXQDA. Both of these tools are supported and can work great, especially in larger research projects. In order to obtain your licence please navigate to the software catalogue. Which of the two you should pick depends largely on what is common practise in your domain and potentially specific features. If you would like to discuss which of these tools is a good fit for your research, book a free meeting with the Brussels Digital Text Lab.
For smaller projects where the complexity of these tools seems excessive you can try out the open source Taguette, which strives to be a free and simple tool that allows highlighting and tagging parts of documents. Do note however, that the actual analysis functionality in taguette is very minimal compared to the paid alternatives.
Especially in larger projects, the time invested in learning the paid software packages is likely to offer a great return on investment.