Surface themes with highlights

A bit like affinity mapping, tags in Dovetail help you identify and keep track of themes that emerge across your research data.

You can highlight and tag any text content within a note - a single word, sentence, or paragraph. This means you can break down long transcripts or documents into snippets to identify and keep track of themes that emerge across your research data.

Highlights made in transcripts linked to video and audio content create individual, searchable clips. These clips are a powerful way to share stories about your research and bring your customer into the room.

A single highlight can have one or many tags associated with it and a single tag can have many highlights associated with it.

Managers and contributors can create highlights. To create highlights, simply select a section of text in a note, and create or apply existing tags to it from the tag picker.

Managers and contributors can create tags within a project from two places:

• From within a note: By highlighting a section of text within a note, the tag picker will appear, where you can create a new tag.

• From a tag board: By opening a tag board, you can create a new tag by pressing + New tag from any group within the board.

You can create multiple tags at once from a single CSV file. This is handy if you have an existing set of tags that you want to bring in to Dovetail.

Your CSV file must be saved as a UTF-8 encoded Comma Separated Value (CSV) file, and must contain a header row and at least 1 column for Title – text format (200 character limit).

You can also import a description next to each tag by mapping another column to Description – text format (300,000 character limit).

During import, you will need to map columns from your spreadsheet to how the tag will be presented in the project. For example, if you have a column for tag names, you can create them as individual tags by mapping this to the option ‘Title’.

You can adjust the start or end position of your highlights without having to delete and re-create a new highlight.

To resize an existing highlight, click onto highlighted text to surface drag handles that bookend the highlight. From there, click and drag the handle to change the position of the highlight.

When you upload a document into a note, you will be able to highlight and tag content within that document in the same way you would with text and transcripts.

At this time, highlights in a document cannot be resized once they’re created. If you need to make any changes, you’ll need to remove all tags on the highlight and create it again.

You can highlight and tag multiple notes in bulk for high-volume analysis in your project. This is ideal for NPS or survey results that are short-form responses.

To do this:

1. Open a note view.

2. Click search in the top right or filter to find the content you’re looking for.

3. Hover over the relevant content and select the check box of notes you wish to tag. The

   bulk actions menu will appear at the bottom once selected.

4. Click Add tag. This will highlight and tag all text content within the note.

Sentiment analysis uses AI to analyze for general or targeted sentiment within your note. It is conducted on the whole note by default, but can be run on part of a note by selecting a section of text before running. Sentences featuring strong sentiments will be highlighted and tagged as Positive or Negative.

• General sentiment looks for any words that have strong positive or negative sentiment.

• Targeted sentiment is similar to general sentiment, but looks for a target for the sentiment. If it isn’t clear what the sentiment is referring to, it ignores it.

In a new note

To run sentiment analysis on your note, click Automation > General/Targeted sentiment from the toolbar. You can also run sentiment analysis on part of a note by selecting a section of text before running.

Some things to note when using sentiment analysis:

• It’s safe to run sentiment analysis again on a page - it won’t double tag any sentences that it has already tagged.

• Sentiment analysis only works on strong sentiments, so running it on your page may result in no highlights being created if the language used isn’t strong enough.

• Sentiment analysis runs in the background so you can close the note or navigate away without interrupting the analysis.

On import

Automatic sentiment analysis can be enabled when you import data into Dovetail using any of the following methods:

• Importing structured spreadsheet data

• Importing data via Zapier action

You can access all highlights created under one tag one of three ways.

• In a note - After highlighting text, click the tag to the right of the page. This will direct you to the tag’s page with related highlights.

• In Tags - In the project sidebar, open Tags and select your tag. This will direct you to the tag’s page.

• In global search - You can use the search bar at the top of the workspace to filter by tag or highlights.

When opening a tag’s page, any video or audio data highlighted will be automatically stitched together into a curated reel. Reels can be edited, shared and downloaded from this page as an engaging resource to let others do the talking when presenting findings to your stakeholders. Learn more about highlight reels →

Managers of Team, Business or Enterprise workspaces can create sets of global tags for users with workspace tags. Learn more about workspace tags and how to create them for your workspace →