Invitation to collaborate

[lichenglu]

Hi Brian,

I know I should not post this in the issues, but I don't want to "stalk" you on the internet to find your contact, yet I am thrilled to see someone is doing what I am trying to do - tools for qualitative research. I am currently working on a qualitative coding tool as an alternative to Nvivo, and I am also heavily using Slate, so I wonder if you have the time and would like to work on the project together?

BTW, I am a PhD student in Learning Technologies at UT Austin, and I think we could have a lot of topics in common :).

[briandk]

Hi!

It's exciting to know someone else is also working in this space! What ideas did you have for collaborating?

[lichenglu]

Hi Brian!

Sorry for the late reply, school has been crazy for the final weeks...

I have been trying to make an open-sourced qualitative data analysis application that can act as the playground for all the modern technologies.

Currently, I think Google's cloud-speech-to-text service is really impressive, which not only gives you accurate transcriptions, but also timestamps of each word. This is powerful in that features such as click word to jump to audio/video playback are possible. There are several commercial sites that make use of Google's feature:
https://www.happyscribe.co/
https://web.descript.com

However, they charge much higher than what Google charges (not a criticism, as I understand building the app has cost). Meanwhile, they are mainly for transcription, and do not offer qualitative data analysis features such as coding, visualization (e.g. cross-tab, discourse analysis viz), and so on.

So I have been working on a project called MVivo, which allows users to use Google's transcription service as well as coding. There is a branch in the repo that calls feature/google-speech, and there is a demo for the click word to jump to audio/video feature I mentioned (kindda hard to find, please refer to the src/containers/audioTranscribe.tsx).

The project is really rough now, mainly because I am still struggling with accomplishing features, instead of writing elegant codes. I was very excited to find that you have worked on a transcribing tool, and we share a similar background. So I think it would be great if you are interested in the project! Any thoughts?