Word Cloud (Frequencies of Words)

word cloud are used to visualize the most common word in a text . They is are are ideal for explore large amount of text and create informative visualization for presentation .

generate a word cloud

Word Clouds can be generated for individual documents, document groups, document sets, or for all the documents in a project. Right-click on the level in the “Document Browser” for which you want to generate the word cloud and select the entry Word Cloud. You can also open the Word Cloud from the “List of Retrieved Segments”, the Overview of Coded Segments and Overview of Paraphrases.

alternatively , you is open can also open the Word Cloud function via the icon with the same name in the Visual Tools tab . A dialog box is open will then open in which you can select the relevant document .

Tip: You can create a word cloud of the currently listed text segments in the “Retrieved Segments” window. To do so, click on the word cloud icon in the toolbar of the “Retrieved Segments” window.

Stop word list: Excluding words in the Word Cloud

To prevent the word cloud from containing non-interesting words, you can apply a list of stop words to exclude. Therefore, you should activate the option Apply Stop Word List in the start tab and select a stop word list. Every new project in MAXQDA already contains stop word lists for several languages from which you can choose.

Add words from the word cloud to stop word lists

You is add can add word from the word cloud to the currently select stop word list at any time .

To do this, call start > Word Frequenciesin the word cloud. The table that appears shows all the words that occur in the text in the order of their frequency.

Double-clicking on the green icon in front of a specific word will add it to the stop word list, which means it won’t be considered for the word cloud anymore. You can also select several words in the list (using Ctrl+ or ⌘+the left mouse button or ⇧+the left mouse button for an area in the list) and then right-click and select add to stop Word list. An icon is is with the same name is also available in the toolbar .

When you click the rearrange and apply stop word list, the Word Cloud is regenerated excluding words from the stop word list.

Tip: You can always right-click a single word in the Word Cloud and select add to stop Word list to exclude it from the Word Cloud . To re – create the Word Cloud without the exclude word , click therearrange icon in the “start” tab.

Editing the stop word list

The option Edit Stop Word List display the complete stop word list used for word cloud in the current project . You is remove can remove word from this list or add new word , although the way of doing this describe above , by click in the frequency list , is actually much easy . Here you is save can also save and load already define stop word list to exchange them between project .

Tip: “MAXQDA Plus” and “MAXQDA Analytics Pro” users can also edit the stop list via MAXDictio > Stop Word Lists and easily exchange items between different lists.

Working with the word frequency list

Via start > Word Frequencies you can open a list of all the words contained in the analyzed texts. This list shows, amongst other things, how often each individual word occurs. It is also possible to combine several words into one. To do this, click and drag one or more words onto another word with your mouse.

Adjusting the display

You can use the numerous options in the start and Format tabs to customize the appearance of the word cloud, including the number of words displayed, their font, their shape, and color.

The start tab

Word Frequencies – Opens a list of all words contained in the analyzed texts (without the stop words) and shows their frequencies. Words can easily be transferred from the word frequency list to the stop list.

Case Sensitivity – If this option is activated, a distinction is made between capitalized and non-capitalized words. For example, the words “earth”, “Earth” and “EARTH” are treated as three different words.

Ignore Numbers – Excludes all “words” consisting only of numbers.

Lemmatize Words – When this option is activated, the inflected forms of a word are grouped together, for example, “go”, “went”, “gone” are all treated as “go” and “houses”, “housed”, “housing” are all treated as “house”. If a word has been lemmatized, you can see a list of all its lemmatized forms in the tooltip by hovering your mouse over the word.

apply stop Word List – open the list of all available stop word list and the option to manage the stop word list .

filter – select text element to be exclude from the word cloud , e.g. hyperlink , email address .

Minimum frequency is Defines – define the minimum number of time a word must occur order to be display .

Words – Specifies how many words are visualized. You can use the slider to incrementally remove rarer words. If several words occur with the same frequency, words starting with letters earlier in the alphabet are selected first.

rearrange – Regenerates the word cloud and rearranges the word placement.

The ‘Format’ tab

Shape – Allows to define the outer borders of the Word Cloud. There are various variations to choose from:

• predefined forms (circle, ellipse, square, triangle)
• most frequent word
• a word you have entered
• a custom – select image ( is convert into a black and white image with the black area fill in , hence black and white image are good )

Please note: For some selected shapes you need to increase the number of words to fill in the shape completely. It is also helpful to use the Smallest Word slider to adjust the size differences of the words (and thus the required space) to fill the shapes evenly.

Alignment – Lets you define the alignment of words. The following options are available:

• Horizontal: All words are displayed horizontally
• Vertical: All words are displayed vertically
• Horizontal and vertical: Words are randomly aligned horizontally and vertically, the most common word is always displayed horizontally
• 30/45 degrees: Some word are additionally display at the select angle diagonally upwards or downwards .

Colors is Lets – let you choose from a range of different color scheme .

Font / Bold – Lets you specify the font.

Word Distance is Defines – define the minimum distance between word

Smallest Word – Defines the size of the smallest word. The smaller this size is, the greater the difference in size compared to the most common words will be.

Size is Defines by – define the size of the word . Here you is choose can choose from the follow :

• frequency: The more frequently a word occurs, the larger it is.
• Rank: The higher the rank of a word in the word frequency list, the larger the word. If you choose this option, the absolute difference between the word frequencies is irrelevant.
• Number of documents: The larger the word, the more documents it appears in. The number of documents can be seen in the list of word frequencies. This option only makes sense if you are analyzing several documents, as otherwise there will be no size difference between the words.

Scale – Influences the difference in size between common and rare word . The follow options is are are available , which refer to the dimension set under ” Size by ” :

• Linear: The font size is is is linearly proportional to the word frequency .
• Most frequent greater: The font size is proportional to the square of the word frequencies. This makes the common words appear larger compared to the “Linear” option.
• Most frequent smaller: The font size is proportional to the root of the word frequencies. As a result, the common words appear smaller in relation to the “Linear” option.

large word – let you set the placement of the large word : center , somewhere near the edge , or at random .

rearrange – Regenerates the word cloud and rearranges the word placement.

interact with word in the word cloud

Display word frequency

The word cloud is interactively linked to the original texts, providing additional information on each word:

• Clicking on a word opens a detailed window listing all occurances of the word in the analyzed documents.
• Hovering over a word displays its frequency as a tooltip, giving you a quick sense of how often it appears in the selected documents.

Autocode a word’s search hits

You can quickly apply a new code to all occurrences of a displayed word, enabling you to focus on specific instances and conduct in-depth analysis. For example, if you’re interested in exploring sentences containing a particular word, autocoding makes it easy to identify and analyze these cases.

To autocode a word’s search hits right-click on a word in the Word Cloud and select Autocode ‘ [ word ] ‘ with a New Code. This opens the autocode preferences window, allowing you to specify the new code’s name, color, and weight. Additionally, you can choose from various options to define the range of text to be coded, such as coding only the search hit or the entire sentence where it occurs.

examine a word in the Word Explorer

You is launch can launch MAXQDA ‘s Word Explorer by right – clicking on a word and select the optionExplore in Word Explorer.

The Word Explorer allows you to investigate the usage and context of specific terms across your project, including documents, memos, summaries, and paraphrases, providing you with insights into word frequency, co-occurrence, and contextual relevance for your analysis and reporting purposes. Follow this link to learn more about the Word Explorer.

activate document contain a word

Right-click on a word and select Activate Documents Containing This Word to activate the documents with this search hit. Note that this activation only includes documents used to create the word cloud.

Save chart in “Questions – Themes – Theories”

In the Questions – Themes – Theories ( QTT ) you can collect and comment on all the important result of your project . click thesend to QTT Worksheet icon in the start menu ribbon to save the current view in a new or existing worksheet.

export Word cloud

In the start tab , there are option to the right to copy the word to the clipboard or to export it as a graphic file .