About

For the professional, one’s meez is an obsession, one’s sword and shield, the only thing standing between you and chaos. If you have your meez right, it means you have your head together, you are “set up”, stocked, organized, ready with everything you need and are likely to need for the tasks at hand.

— Anthony Bourdain, Le Halles Cookbook

Qualitative scientists use a variety of methods for analyzing their data. Some of these are informal and specialized to the task and researcher, and others depend upon a paradigm that relies upon software to complete successfully. Most of the software available to assist researchers in their analysis of qualitative data is proprietary, locking researchers to their software, and providing an excess of features that clutter the digital workspace. The available open source alternatives narrowly focus on a particular discipline or type of data, are poorly supported, or have their own steep learning curve.

Mise offers a middle path between these two alternatives and is designed with the culinary principal of mise en place, the parsimonious and deliberate organization of material needed for the task at hand. Mise is open source, free to use and extend, and capable of running on macOS, Linux, and Windows. It keeps your data in open formats that promise to endure indefinitely, designed to keep you as close to your data as possible, and is not bloated with unnecessary features or narrow functions. If you have used Atlas.ti, Nvivo, or Dedoose before, you will quickly be able to take up and use Mise.

Design Principles

  1. You control your data

Mise is designed with a plain text paradigm for conducting research in mind, and doesn’t lock the user into proprietary binary files. Your data in Mise remains interpretable and exportable without using Mise itself. You can automate, version and audit all your project files, allowing your work to remain autonomous, transparent, and reproducibile.

  1. Simplicity first

The design of Mise discourages over-coding and taxonomic sprawl by requiring the assignment of mutually exclusive tags to segments of text. Rather than a simple constraint imposed by the limits of software, this is a deliberate methodological choice. Coding schemes are confined to a set of parent-child codes, where parent codes can have many child, or sub-codes, but child codes have no progeny. This shallow hierarchy prevents coding schemes from growing narrower and narrower increasing the speed of analysis and the reliability of insight.

  1. Portability

Mise runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and projects move between them without any conversion or migration steps. Because the software is freely available and not tied to restrictive licensing, teams can work across different machines and operating systems without barriers. Open, simple project formats also support long-term accessibility beyond the lifecycle of any single device or platform.

For more information about the specific design choices made in the development of Mise, please see the Documentation page.