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This photo was taken on Poděbrady, Czech Republic, a lovely small city that I visited for a conference during last summer.

The drawing was in the door of a coffee shop that was, unfortunately, closed during my visit.

I am a user of free software since 2004 and a big enthusiast of the idea both in a practical and ideological sense. It has been more than 10 years since I do not need windows and I try to contribute with free software as often as I can.

When I realized my Ph.D research would be based on qualitative data, I noticed that I would have problems to find a free (open, libre) software to help me in the process. After some research, I decided to develop a software with one immediate and one long-term goal:

• Help me to organize and analyse the qualitative data collected in my Ph.D. research (images);
• Be constructed in such way that can be extended to support other typical sources of qualitative data (such as text, audio and video) in a simple and open format.

This was my background project during the last 10 months. I would say I have spent about 40 hours of coding in it and, fortunately, I was able to get to a stage where it does most of the things I need and it may be useful to other researchers. That is why I decided to make it public: https://github.com/barichello/openQDA.

It is far from a full featured software, but I am incorporating more features progressively and it can already be combined with Nvivo via the scripts developed by BarraQDA. more info here.

Hopefully, this software will evolve to a free alternative to Nvivo!

(Português) Tirinha adaptada de www.malvados.com.br/index1162.html. Gostou? Leia mais em malvados.com.br.

(English) Comic strip adapted from http://www.malvados.com.br/index1162.html. Enjoyed? Read more at malvados.com.br (in Portuguese).