Quirkos Web - Step-by-step guide

Quirkos only works with text data and you can currently import files directly from Word files (.docx), Portable Document Format (.pdf) and Excel spreadsheets (.xlsx). With Quirkos Transcribe, you can also import most video (.mp4, .mov, etc) and audio files (.mp3, .wav, etc), which will be transcribed into text automatically for you.

It's also possible to use the copy and paste functions on your computer to put data into a new blank source in Quirkos. This is useful to bring in data from a webpage (like a blog article, or social media stream) or even if you just want a small part of larger documents. Finally, you can create a blank source that you can write directly into. This works well for recording ongoing memos, and copying and pasting from multiple sources.

These options are available by clicking on the main menu button on the top left of the screen. If choosing the 'Import' option you will get a dialogue to select one or more text files from your computer. All your sources can be edited at any time by right clicking on the ... button at the top left of the source, and choosing Edit. After you've finished your changes, click the tick to save them.

You will see your text sources shown as a column on the right side of the screen. At the left of the source is a scroll-able list of tabs which display other sources in the project. At the top of this is the Source Browser button which shows a list of all the sources in the project, and allows you to search for a source name, or filter by source properties. Clicking on a source here will load it in the text view column.

What topics do you want to pick out from your data? In Quirkos these codes, themes or 'nodes' are represented by coloured bubbles which grow each time you add some text to them. They are used to group together sections of the text (or highlights) on a particular topic, such as Family, Voting, or Disagreements. They are shown in the blue 'canvas' area on the left side of the screen. You can create a new topic category by right clicking anywhere on the canvas view area on the left of the screen. A new bubble is created and a dialogue pops up to let you change the name, description and colour of the bubble. Right clicking on a bubble later gives you options to edit these properties again. These topic bubbles, or 'Quirks' can be moved anywhere around the canvas, by dragging and dropping them. You can also create a new code containing a section of text by dragging and dropping some text onto a blank part of the canvas.

It's also possible to group your themes, which is again a simple drag and drop. Just drop one bubble onto another, and it becomes a nested sub-category. For example you might have a category for Bread, and many different types as sub-categories, like Brown, Wholemeal, Rye, Sour-dough. You can even have sub-sub categories such as Bread -> Brown –> Seeded.

Once you have coded some or all of your sources, there are many tools in Quirkos that let you explore the data, looking for trends and surprises.

Using the Query view, you can run filtered searches to bring out coded data from particular kinds of sources, or work done by particular people during certain time periods.

Right clicking on any of the topic bubbles will allow you to show an 'overlap' view, which visualises connections between the themes based on how often they are coded together.