The "Shiny Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software" app is a multi-user CAQDAS built with R Shiny.
The pilot contained in this repository originated as a project to collect and code a blog, that happened to be a Wordpress.org site. So is wilwheaton.net, and so here we are. This repository contains Python code to scrape the content from the Wordpress API into a database and a Shiny app to allow users to view and assign codes to excerpts. A small portion of the scraped data is included for an easy demo.
The single-file app.R and a tiny bit of CSS and JavaScript comprise the coding tool. The app currently stores the user-assigned codes in a local "codes.RData" file. A planned feature, making ShAQDAS actually multi-user, is to allow annotations to be stored in one database for real-time collaboration.
Once launched, ShAQDAS displays three tabs: two for the pupose of coding articles and one for importing / exporting the entered codes. The "Post" and "Comments" tab work the same way: copy text you want to code into the text form, optionally compose a memo, and choose a code. Highlighting would be nice; any idea how to implement?
A selected article's main "post" is visible in this tab, and the associated author and publication date show in the sidebar. Any codes added in the sidebar are associated with the content visible in this tab.
All comments on a selected article are visible in this tab, the selected comment is highlighted with a red border, and the associated author and publication date show in the sidebar. Any codes added in the sidebar are associated with the content within the red box visible in this tab.
There are two tables that can be imported or exported (both are stored locally within a "RData" file). The "Codebook" is a table that determines which codes are available in the drop down menu for code entry. Additional records can be appended one-at-a-time here. The "Codes" table holds all entered codes. Uploading either one will overwrite the tables in the app, so always "Download" a copy as a backup before uploading a replacement.
The app is currently limited to data from a website running the
WordPress.org REST API. Local storage is in a SQLite database, but
would be changed to PostgreSQL in production. Local database tables
are defined and populated using the Python SQLAlchemy and requests
modules, and can be recreated by executing python wordpress_scrape.py. Caution: Wil Wheaton writes alot of blogs; I
killed this after the database topped a few Mb, then cleaned up
foreign keys in the sample. The site URL and database name are
hard-coded in this pilot, but could easily be changed. The table
definitions are specified through the ORM in
wordpress_orm.py. It's not entirely necessary that
the data be offlined all-at-once like this, or even at all, but is
perhaps good for reproducibility (bad for updating).