🌻 Create Links tab
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Qualitative causal mapping involves taking passages of text, e.g. from interviews or documents, and identifying sections which make causal claims. We highlight each of these sections and specify a causal factor at each end of each link (for example Lost job or Went hungry). This means creating a new factor or reusing an existing one. Usually we create these factors inductively as we code, and revise and review and consolidate them as part of the process, as with any other kind of qualitative content analysis.

To code a causal link,

Source Text Viewer#

✨ What you can do here: Read your source documents and create causal links by highlighting text. When you highlight a passage that claims or implies that one thing influences or causes another, a popup lets you identify the cause and effect. This is where you do the core work of mapping out causal relationships from your source material, a process which we call *coding*

The text viewr shows full text from the selected source. If you have selected multiple sources, it shows the text from the first selected source. You can:

Inside the header, there is an info ℹ️ icon which toggles open/shut a panel beneath it which shows the values of the custom columns for the current source e.g. gender etc.

Navigate sources:

Navigate highlights within the current source:

Source selection is filtered through the sources selector dropdown. When multiple sources are loaded, the first source is displayed. The next/previous buttons cycle through sources by updating the sources selector to show the next/previous source.

This is convenient because usually when coding you will want to view the Map and Links for the same source on the right.

Clicking these buttons means that if you previously had a multiple selection, you now have only one.

Dealing with long documents in the source text viewer#

For documents longer than ~30-40 pages, the text viewer automatically splits content into manageable chunks for better performance. Navigation controls appear in the "Source text" header:

Visual Highlighting#

Each section of coded text, each causal claim, is shown with a highlight.

For overlapping or identical highlights with multiple links, overlaps are shown with varying color opacity. Clicking on multiple highlights shows a link selector for each section.

Link Editor screen#

Opens when you highlight text or click on existing links.

Fields:

Actions:

Links in Causal Map only have one cause and one effect. You can add multiple causes and/or effects to the boxes, and the system createsall combinations when saving. So if you put unemployment and violence in the Cause box, and stress and worry in the Effect box, the system will create four links.

About the factor label dropdown menus#

By creating links, you also create the names of your factors.

In Causal Map, a factorisits label. Once you create a label, there is nothing else to add.

Factor names which contain semicolons ; get special treatment as they separate the different parts of 🔖 Hierarchical factors .

After beginning to create links between factors, already-coded factors will appear in the dropdown menus in the to and from factor boxes. For added convenience. The most frequently coded factors will appear at the top of this list

Link tags are available as a special kind of memo when coding a link: you can use them to provide any kind of additional information.

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There is no need to actually use a hash # at the start of a link tag, though you can if you want. Just use any unique single word which is easy to search and filter on, like #nutrition or nutrition# or nutrition–.

As usual in Causal Map, you can apply one or more tags, and you can either select existing tags or create new ones on the fly.

Later, you can filter the map (see ✨ Transforms Filters: Include or exclude tags) to show only links containing or beginning or ending with specific hashtags (or parts of hashtags), and also for links which donotcontain specific hashtags or parts of hashtags.

You can also use tags to narrow down your searches in 🔗 The Manage Links tab.

You can display tags on your map.

Conceptually, there are two kinds of tag.

You can use any tag which does not begin with a ? to record any other information about the link, e.g.:

Weak tags#

Weak tags are a special kind of tag. They arecaveats. If you use weak tags, you should make sure that by default your maps do not include any link with a weak tag.

This is just a convention, it makes no difference to the Causal Map app.

They begin with ? and are used to mark any link which you are not sure is always valid across the global context for the whole global map, for example:

AI Coding#

Requires AI subscription

Motivation for source prompt: it is just to describe the context/background info about each source. Not necessary e.g. where all the sources are from the same context which can be described in the main prompt. But important where some differ, e.g. mid-term reports or whatever.

If Add Source Prompt is ON, then show a text area above #text-viewer-content with usual greenish Save button to edit the corresponding source prompt for the current source.

Additional controls hidden behind gear icon (experimental):

Iterative Processing: If your prompt contains lines with ==<mark> on their own, each section before and after the line is treated as a separate iteration. Line endings and surrounding spaces are tolerated (CRLF/whitespace OK). First iteration is normal; subsequent ones include the full prior conversation history (all previous User prompts and AI responses) to build on earlier results. Only the results of the last iteration are added to the links table; all iterations are logged in the responses panel.

Workflow:

Tips on using the prompt history