27. New Feature at Itracks: Tags and Annotations

Earlier, I posted a heads-up about a new feature about to find its way to the Itracks BBFG software.

That feature, which Itracks calls "Footnotes", has now been announced and implemented.

Footnotes allows the researcher to code or tag responses with a customizable set of categories. For instance, I might decide to code any quotation-worthy response under the tag "quotable". Once ready to begin my analysis and reporting, I could download the transcript and sort all the "quotables" to jump-start my analysis. This on-the-fly coding also ensures that I do not inadvertently forget important statements by participants.

The coding feature could be used in various other ways. For instance, I might use a "positive" and "negative" tag in certain questions to help me sort through the wealth of information that is invariably generated on bulletin board focus groups. As well, I might have a category called "Further probes" that I might attach to responses for eventual followup.

The software allows the researcher to use multiple codes (a participant statement can be both "positive" and "quotable", for instance).

The software also provides for a visual cue (a small coloured square) indicating that a particular respondent response has been tagged. The small square's colour is customizable, as is the name of the tag itself. There are as many squares visible on the response as there are tags assigned to a particular response.

The introduction of this tagging feature alone would be cause for celebration among users of the Itracks BBFG. But there's more.

Itracks has also introduced an annotation feature. Not only can the researcher assign a code or tag to each participant statement, he or she can also add a comment (of practically any length) to each tag, for each comment.

This represents a very welcome development that I'm sure will result in faster and better analysis and reporting. Consider that the researcher can now, as he or she is reading a participant comment for the first time, quickly and painlessly attach immediate reactions, thoughts, insights, or even preliminary hypotheses to the statement.



I can imagine using a series of codes to carry all of the annotations, say "Observations", "Hypothesis", "Conclusion", and "Implications". As the discussion portion of the project progresses to its eventual end, the report almost builds itself from these annotations.

In fact, given that these annotations can be downloaded as part of the transcript, it is not a reach to suspect that reports will now be already 50% complete when the interviewing part of the project ends.

Kudos.