Tag clouds and word frequency lists: Do you want to begin your analysis with an overview of the most common terms used in your data, or display these words graphically in a presentation? In MAXQDA is this possible in just a few steps. With the help of tag clouds, it is easy to graphically represent the most common words.
To view the most common words in a tag cloud, just right-click on the desired document, set, or document group, and select the “tag cloud” option. In the resulting tag cloud, the most common words will be represented in different sizes. Select the “word frequency list,” and a tabular view of the most frequently used words will appear below the tag cloud. You can also view percentages and word lengths. The list of references can be viewed, exported or auto-coded.
If your word cloud contains words that are not useful to your analysis, you can use the “Edit Stop List” option. This feature allows you to enter certain words, either automatically or manually, which MAXQDA will exclude from the presentation. Words such as “the” or “one” can be brought into a (saveable!) stop list with a click of the mouse, so that only relevant terms will be mapped for your analysis. Templates for MAXQDA stop lists can be downloaded from our website.
Once a tag cloud is created, it can be easily exported, for example to a Word document. Tag clouds are a quick, impressive way to visualize vocabulary for your analysis.
