A few weeks ago I helped organize and instruct a Software Carpentry workshop geared towards social scientists, with the great help from folks at UW-Madison’s Advanced Computing Institute. Aside from tweaking a few examples (e.g. replacing an example using fake cochlear implant data with one of fake survey data), the curriculum was largely the same. The Software Carpentry curriculum is made to help researchers, mostly in STEM fields, to write code for reproducibility and collaboration. There’s instruction in the Unix shell, a scripting language of your choice (we did Python), and collaboration with Git.
We had a good mix of folks at the workshop, many who had some familiarity with coding to those who had zero experience. There were a number of questions at the workshop about how folks could use these tools in their research, a lot of them coming from qualitative researchers.
I was curious about what other ways researchers who use qualitative methods could incorporate programming into their research routine. So I took to Facebook and Twitter.