My approach would be a combination of the actual Keywords feature, to flag broader sections of text as containing certain topics, with the Styles feature to do the actual marking of text.
Here is a simple test of the idea:
Select a phrase of text in the editor, and pop open the Styles panel with Format/Styles/Show Styles Panel (⌃S). You don’t have to actually change colour or anything, the style is going to mainly be cosmetic and we’ll use another feature to do the actual colouring, rather than text formatting. You can if you want to though of course.
Click the + button to create a new style.
With the Formatting type set to character attributes only, enable the Highlight Box section and choose a colour.
Give it a shortcut if you’re going to use it a lot, and then save it.
Okay you’ll see the result in the editor. You could use black here if you wanted to “redact” chunks of text, rainbow colours for topical notes, etc.
Using styles also means you can select and easily copy and paste non-linear chunks of text as well, pulling them into chapters as needed. If you right-click on a style in the panel, you’ll find an option to select all text using that style.
Keywords on the other hand will help you find the selections of text in the first place. I would cut things down as tightly as possible in terms of how much text to keep in each chunk of text in the outliner. The more precise your sections, the better those keywords will be. Since interviews tend to have a little back and forth over one topic before moving on to another larger topic, that cadence might make for a good break point.
Keywords can be easily searched for from the Project/Show Project Keywords panel (⇧⌘K). Select the keyword(s) to search for and click the magnifying glass button (right-click for options).
So the final workflow would be to combine the ability to gather all interview with “Green” text flagged within it, then from the search result sidebar, click the hook arrow button in the sidebar header to put the results into the main editor, view as Scrivenings, and select all green marked text with the style panel.
If you can afford it ($500+), I’d strongly recommend getting NVivo, MaxQDA, AtlasTi, or other QDA software that is designed for exactly this kind of task. You will want paragraph-level coding, reports by code, etc. etc. and all of the crazy hoop jumping that’s required to do a fraction of the tasks you describe in Scrivener will be trivial stuff that’s covered in the first chapter of the manual. Scrivener is a writing program not a qualitative data analysis program, and (having tried a similar approach briefly going to MaxQDA) it’s really not the ideal tool for the task. IMHO (as a professional anthropologist and teacher of qualitative research methods).
For example, rather than having your coding as colored styles with no way to assign multiple codes to the same passage, you’d be able to assign multiple codes and have them all displayed in the margin, then filter the document to display only passage with a given code or codes, or combinations (e.g. passages where people discuss money but not credit etc,). See e.g. maxqda.com/help-max12/how-t … nt-browser
If this sounds heavy-handed, it’s because for me, tasks that literally took days with a combination of pen and paper notebooks, word processor files , and a FileMaker database that indexed everything, I can now accomplish in seconds, No more cutting and pasting to gather all the notes on a given topic together - once the documents are coded, all the passages with a given code are instantly available.
If you’re attached to a university you might check if there is an institutional site license for any of the above.
Dang this stuff has gotten really expensive. I think they figure everyone is either writing the cost into research grant proposals or analyzing focus groups for a fortune 500 client… I’ve always been paying educational prices and using institutional money which had shielded me from the highest tier of pricing.
Two options are Dedoose (but it’s a subscription web app) and a new player called Quirkos. I haven’t used either in depth. (MaxQDA gave me a free trial license for one year as a conference promo & I took the bait…).
The Silver and Lewins book referenced in the latter site is well worth getting, too. And there is lots of helpful material on the rest of the surrey site.
This workflow described is from a post long ago, but I wonder if the current Mac version of Scrivener has additional features or functions that would help with this at all? Essentially, my question is, “If you were answering this question today, how would you modify this workflow suggestion?”
Thank you!
Jay
you may want to have a look at granthika (granthika.co/?utm_source=granthika-blog) - it allows you to tag pieces of text in a document, and to assign different tags to the same piece of text.
It may not do all you want it to - I don’t know as I haven’t explored it in detail yet myself (that’s end of the year for me, can’t afford to be too distracted by new tools at the moment). But, the price is around $100/year so perhaps more affordable.
I often need to track themes within a project - these themes are defined by many pieces of text spread over many documents. The size of these pieces of text varies from one or two words, to one or two sentences.
Keywords and labels can only be assigned to a file, and not specific texts within a document, and so do not satisfy my requirement.
It’s worth searching this forum for workarounds (sorry I don’t have any specific links to hand) - my current approach to this problem (thanks to suggestions from the forum) is to use formatted linked comments. If I want to ‘tag’ some text I highlight it and create a linked comment - I colour that comment a specific colour and start it with a specific text string. EG I might have one theme where the colour is red, and the string is ‘Character A - background’, and another theme where the colour is blue, and string is ‘Character Z - background’.
The ‘tagging’/commenting is not too onerous, The efficient retrieval of all pieces of text for a specific theme is a bit more unwieldy (saved ‘Collections’ can help here).
I wouldn’t. This thread is recent enough to refer to Scrivener 3, the current major version. There have been updates since this thread, but none of them really affect the functionality described here.
Katherine,
Thank you for responding–earlier in the thread you suggested using a keyword to identify each interviewee. Is that so that identifying the source of a given quote is easier? Are there ways to compile so that the keyword is included on the page (to identify the speaker)? Something like:
JOHN D Well, there were days I couldn’t handle, for sure.
JUNE D And more that I did handle, remember?
JOHN D The times between living together and being married almost didn’t exist.
There are lots of ways to display an oral history, and having flexibility to display the speaker’s name either to the left or just above, would be wonderful. I’ve considered using something like a screenwriting format for these sections–not sure if I can shift in and out of that within a document though.
Bottom line: If I can ensure that I keep “display flexibility” through a best practice, as I start to bring in the interview content, I’d be so happy.
Yes, I’d use a keyword to identify the source of the quote.
For your example, though, I think your instinct that the screenwriting features might be better is probably accurate. Keywords are document-level metadata, so not that convenient for verbatim transcription.
“Script mode” is applied on a per document basis, so you can easily mix “scripts” and normal text within a project.
With the note that you can type text anywhere you want, and style it, sure it doesn’t matter where you put the text.
As to the main point of your question though, I don’t understand how you would be trying to accomplish that. Most of what I wrote about was using styles in the text editor, but you seem to be asking about PDF files.
I meant that I can use your keyboard shortcut as a highlighting tool as well. So, if I import a pdf as a word document, it opens in the drafts folder and I use the shortcut to highlight. Some pdf’s are too large, and can’t be so converted, and I was wondering if I could use the same keyboard shortcut.
Since the keyboard shortcuts I refer to are to apply styles, no they can’t be used in PDF since those kinds of files do not support word processor type styles.
So, what I did was invoked the ‘find by formatting’ window and selected the ‘Style’ that I had defined using your guidance. It shows ‘next’, but how do I see all the outcomes with the same style in ONE window, like Scrivenings as you’ve indicated?
There may be some confusion over what the expected result would be. If you are searching and then putting the search results into Scrivenings, all of the text will be displayed from the search results, not just the styled text. There is no way to do that in Scrivener. What I described just means the only text you will have in the editor are sections that contain what you’re looking for. The Find by Formatting tool jumps you from one hit to the next, however far away it may be in the scroll view.
Is there some way to ‘clip’ each of the results in the ‘find’ window? While reading interview or call transcripts, it can be of great utility. I fully understand that is not what Scrivener is about, but this force m and your ideas do make it a utility tool, at least for me. Andy I think that is also the case for a large number of people who post in this forum. So, any ‘hacks’ or ideas about collecting all the find windows will be greatly appreciated.
Yeah, I wouldn’t even call it a “hack” as there is a dedicated way of doing that. One of the advantages of having everything in a single Scrivenings session like this is that all of the styled text you are looking for is in the same text view together. This means if you open the Styles panel and right-click on the style you wish to “clip”, you will get a “Select All Text with Character|Paragraph Style” command. Now press ⌘C to copy them all at once, and paste them into another text document.
You can also do this from any visible example of the styled text in the main editor, rather than using the panel. Just put the cursor anywhere within the range, and use Edit ▸ Select ▸ Select All Style.