I’m not tech-savvy enough to give you an expert opinion. But I know some people who are, and who actually work on developing QualCoder, and they are very concerned about privacy and data security – hence, I believe that it is safe. Also, QualCoder runs locally on your computer and doesn’t require a connection to the internet, so nobody should be able to access your data remotely without (or even with) your consent. But anonymising your data before importing it into QualCoder (or any QDA software) is a good idea, either way. Interestingly, there have recently been added some (optional) AI features to QualCoder (using OpenAI’s GPT). That does raise a few questions regarding data security. These features do upload some of your data to OpenAI’s servers (as well as Amazon’s AWS) for analysis – but again, security has been taken very seriously, and most of the data is processed locally, without sharing it with any party over the internet. A lot of (probably most) commercial QDA software with AI features is far less secure in this regard. So, if you’re interested in using AI in research and concerned about security, QualCoder is certainly one of the better choices. And even if you aren’t, I think it’s still more trustworthy than commercial software. More on reddit.com

I have no idea if R is something that applies to this, but we’re using it exclusively for an upcoming management data analysis course. It’s free and works on Mac. More on reddit.com

One app that has definitely helped me - and helped others outside anthro, I'm sure - is a good citation manager. Zotero is a wonderful tool! Off the top of my head, organizing and collecting fieldnotes can be time consuming or tedious. Something that could scan, organize, and annotate or provide space to annotate handwritten and typed notes might be really handy! More on reddit.com

Here’s a good list with links: https://www.etsu.edu/its/rcs/services/datamanagement/qda.php More on reddit.com