About Soak Research

Soak Research is a platform for LLM-assisted qualitative analysis. It provides a managed web interface to the open source soaking package. The goal of the site is to provide cutting edge computational text analysis tools in the most accessible way possible. It is not intended to replace traditional qualitative analytic methods, but to complement them.

Open Core

Built on transparent, peer-reviewable foundations

Soak Research is built on soaking, an open-source Python library for LLM-assisted qualitative analysis. The core algorithms, pipeline execution, and analytical methods are freely available under the AGPL licence -- you can inspect every line of code, validate the methods, and extend them for your own research.

Importantly, your research data and analytical outputs belong to you. Everything you create in Soak (and on soakresearch.com) can be exported and processed with the open-source library. If we disappeared tomorrow, your workflows would still work.

The soaking library

  • View and contribute to the package on GitHub
  • PyPI project page
  • Zenodo software publication archive

    • Using soakresearch.com

    The web application builds on the python package to provide:

    • Managed infrastructure -- No Python setup, API keys, or command line required
    • EU data residency -- Documents stay in Europe by default, and we manage complex deployment and compliance issues when using US based AI vendors like Microsoft.
    • Team collaboration -- Share analyses with colleagues, control who sees what
    • Progress tracking -- Watch pipeline execution in real time
    • Cost management -- Monitor LLM usage with prepaid credits

    Citing soak in your research

    If you use soak (either the library or web application) in published research, please cite:

    Ben Whalley. (2025). benwhalley/soak: Initial public release (v0.3.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17293023

    Contributing

    The soaking library welcomes contributions - see the giuthub repo for more details. For academic collaborations, methods papers, or validation studies, please get in touch directly.

    Licence

    The soaking Python library is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPL-3.0). This means you can use, modify, and distribute the code freely, provided that derivative works are also made available under the same licence.