
Today, I have an announcement about a quality time software project of mine:
Many years ago, I started helping a member of the family to better organize the qualitative research data that accumulated during a digital humanities research project. At first, using an Excel file to categorize document references, notes on books, etc., worked quite well. However, over time, the Excel file grew to thousands of cells and 2 MB of pure text data. Some cells suddenly contained several pages of text, and the research project became a multi-person endeavor in which several people needed to work on the data at the same time and from different places. This pretty quickly resulted in unsettling questions such as ‘which of those many Excel files contains the latest version of the data’. And, as in any research project that grows, finding and modifying data in the sheet became more and more difficult as well.
At this point, the situation became too chaotic for my taste so I decided to program a web-based Document Research Database project in my quality time to help out. As others in our circle of researcher friends have found the solution quite helpful for their work as well, I have now open-sourced the project to make it available to a wider audience. The source code is GPL-3 licensed, so anyone can now use it for free by setting up their own instances.
Continue reading Keeping Track of Document Research Data