Introduction to the Reproducible Open Coding
Kit (ROCK)
The Reproducible Open Coding Kit (ROCK) was developed to
facilitate reproducible and open coding, specifically geared towards
qualitative research methods. It was designed to be a standard that
realized coded qualitative data that is simultaneously human- and
machine-readable, similar to the spirit of Markdown and YAML.
To code something with the ROCK, add the code to the line your want
to code, in between two pairs of square brackets:
Some example text,
and some more. [[look_a_code]]
And the end.
The {rock} package can parse sources like this, and then
allows you to do what you can do with conventional (often proprietary)
software for qualitative analysis. For example, it can prettify the
source to be displayed like this: 1
Some example text,
and some more. [[look_a_code]]
And the end.
Here, you can quickly recognize the code, which has been placed in a
blue block.
The ROCK standard supports a number of types of codes, attributes,
comments, and other things. Below, you can see a prettified example
source that shows many of these.
Codes in a flat or hierarchical organizational mode are in blue
blocks again; value codes (for magnitude coding) are in yellow blocks;
and class instance identifiers are in pink blocks. Utterance identifiers
are in grey blocks (see [rock::prepend_ids_to_source()]), section breaks
(used for segmentation) have a light blue/purplish background. Finally,
embedded YAML chunks have a green background.