Quickfields

Summary

Quickfields are a special kind of hashtag for factors and links. They are a refinement of hashtags for when you have a set of categories which is mutually exclusive.

You can add information about one or more dimensions using a format like this:

Crops improved / time:before

Crops improved / time:after

A field (in this case, a field called time) will then be created in the factors table which you can then use for example to filter the maps, to search, filter and organise the factors, links and mentions tables, and to format the maps.

Example uses:

• capturing time before/after
• capturing factors which are explicitly or implicitly attributed to a particular project
• capturing the valence of a factor e.g. when a subject explicitly says the liked or did not like the fact that they had more work
• capturing things which apply only, say, to girls or only to boys
• organising ideas within a hierarchy

You can search for and display this information across all your tables and maps, not separately as they would be if you used ordinary hashtags like #before and #after, but together.

Here is more info about analysis with quickfields.

Alternative formulations

These are equivalent, you can

Crops improved time:after

Crops improved /time:after (optionally use a / just to separate the fields visually)

or you can use a hanging hashtag:

Crops improved; time:after (a so-called “hanging hashtag” which is perhaps a bit more readable and moves the quick field to a lower level of the hierarchy).

Quickfields are also ordinary hashtags

Quick field hashtags are still hashtags, so you can still also do all the things you would do with hashtags, for example search for “time:after” as a complete hashtag just as you would if it did not contain an : sign.

find factors label contains time:after

is equivalent to

find factors time=after

Syntax

Quickfields must be composed only of letters and numbers, no punctuation or spaces. There must be no gap on either side of the colon (:).

More than one quick field

You can combine more than one quick field at once:

Crops improved / time:after / valence:2 (the / symbols here are not strictly necessary but improve readability.)

Permanence

Quickfields become part of the factors table, you can even export them, but the values of the fields are always immediately overwritten if you change the labels. Values of fields derived from labels always take precedence, so there is no point roundtripping a quick field as it will be overwritten according to the labels. (You can always roundtrip other fields in the factors table which are not mentioned in the labels. So you can have a field called, say, valence, which is not mentioned in the factor labels in the form, say, / valence:high).

Position in hierarchy

Usually quickfields are put at the end the labels. This makes it easy to find and manipulate the factor labels in the Factor Editor. But quicklinks can appear anywhere in a label and in particular anywhere within a hierarchy:

Anti-discrimination policy / theme:gender; disciplinary rules

Anti-discrimination policy / theme:race; awareness training

This makes particular sense when the lower levels of the hierarchy might differ according to theme. Hierarchy and quickfields are a powerful combination.

Current limitation

When you use filters which merge factors together (zooming and bundling factors) the values of quickfields for any factors which are lost because they are nested into the higher levels are not available.

Quickfields for links

Quickfields are now available for links too. You use the same syntax in the “hashtags” box as for quickfields for factors. This might seem like a small tweak but it means you can now systematically include information about the context of each link. Whereas previously you could mark that a particular link refers only to the context of before Covid by marking it with a hashtag like #before-covid, now you can use systematic sets of hashtags like #covid:before and #covid:after, which automatically then adds a column to your links table called covid which can have values like before, after, and anything else you type.

Quickfields for factor labels versus ordinary hashtags for links

It makes most sense to add dimensional information as described above when the distinctions are best understood as part of the causal structure, as part of the hierarchy of factors. For example:

• You want to express two or more different dimensions within your factor system at the same time, e.g. both time and theme.
• There might be qualitative differences in the lower parts of the hierarchy, e.g.
  • Approach /sport:football; dealing with penalties
  • Approach /sport:swimming; different lengths

On the other hand, you might prefer to use link hashtags rather than quickfields if:

• The dimensions you want to record cut right across your entire factor system and don’t apply to any particular part of it
• You want to combine the information with information from your sources table. For example, you might have a set of 20 documents, 5 on each of 4 countries, and so in your links table (transferred automatically from the sources table) you already have a field called, say, #country; but sometimes a report on one country, say, China, makes causal claims about a different country, say France. In this case, you might want to add a hashtag #country:France to these links.
  • What should the app do in this case? Should it override the information in the #country column of the links table, which would have been China in this case, rewriting it as France?