The Topics Dashboard

The Topics Dashboard is where you can create and manage your MAXQDA Tailwind project's topics.

🔬 Working with Topics in MAXQDA Tailwind

Once you have imported files into your project, you can analyze them using the Topics Dashboard. Tailwind offers powerful capabilities for analyzing, summarizing, and identifying key topics in your data.

You can create and manage up to 20 topics during the beta phase. There are two ways to add topics: manually or automatically. Here’s how you can do both, starting with the manual and moving on to the automatic process:

🕵️‍♂️ Manually adding topics

You can manually add topics one at a time by following these steps:

1. Navigate to the Topics Dashboard using the sidebar navigation.
2. Click the Add Topic button.
3. In the dialog that appears, enter the name of the topic you want to analyze across your data. Optionally, you can also add a topic description, which can improve the analysis and produce more meaningful results.

4. Click Add Topic. Alternatively, you can click Cancel to stop the process.

Tailwind will analyze your data based on the topic name, description, and content of the imported files tp generate a topic summary.

🤖 Automatically finding topics

Alternatively, you can use Tailwind to identify topics in your data:

1. To extract topics using AI, first navigate to the Topics Dashboard using the sidebar navigation.
2. Click the Find Topics button.
3. Tailwind will analyze your data and identify potential topics. This may take a while, depending on your data.
4. A pop-up displaying the identified topics and short descriptions will appear, as shown below.

5. Select the topics you want to add by checking the boxes next to them.
6. Once you have made your selections, click Add Topics. Alternatively, you can click Cancel to quit the process.

Tailwind will analyze your data and extract relevant topics based on the topic name, description, and content of the imported files.

If you would like an overview of the MAXQDA Tailwind interface, please visit our Getting Started with MAXQDA Tailwind page, where we cover the basics of navigating the web app.

The topic summaries

After completing either process, Tailwind adds topics as tiles in the Topics Dashboard for your review. These tiles initially display a progress indicator, indicating that the summarization process is still ongoing. Once complete, you can view the AI-generated topic summaries and modify your topic descriptions as needed.



Interactive references to original documents

The AI-generated topic summaries include interactive references to the original document. To review your topics alongside the document summary and the original document:

1. Click on a reference to the desired document in the "Document View" panel.
2. The panel will slide open, displaying:
   • The AI document summary at the top
   • The original document below it
3. You can click on an interactive reference within the document summary to automatically scroll the document to the source material and higlighted in green:


Closing the "Document View"

To close the document view, click the Close icon located in the upper right corner of the panel.

Refresh your topic summary if you need to:

• Reflect changes in the topic description.
• Update summaries after deleting a file or adding a new one to your data.

📇 Managing topic tiles

Each topic tile includes the following elements:

1. Topic Name: The title of the topic.
2. Description: A brief description providing additional details about the topic.
3. AI Summary: An automatically generated summary by MAXQDA Tailwind. You can copy this to the clipboard or refresh it to reflect any changes in the data or description.
4. Actions:
   • Edit name and description: Click to modify the topic name and description.
     1. To save your edits, click the Done icon that appears once you click the field:
     
     2. To discard your edits, click the Delete icon.
     3. If you accidentally clicked to edit a name or description and want to cancel, just click anywhere outside the field.
   • More options: Click to access the option to delete a topic.
   • Copy to clipboard: Copy the AI-generated summary to the clipboard.
   • Refresh icon: Refresh the AI-generated summary to update it to reflect any changes.
• Please be aware that deleting a topic cannot be undone and topics cannot be restored once deleted.
• You can only delete a topic if it is not used in any Summary Table. MAXQDA Tailwind will notify you if the topic is in use.
  • In this case, you need to delete the Summary Table first. Then, you can return to the Data Dashboard to delete the topic.

🔄Exporting topics

To export topics in Excel format, click the Export button.

What to expect from Tailwind’s AI output: Variation and safety

• Dynamic topic suggestions
  When you use the "Find Topics" feature, Tailwind analyzes your data and suggests relevant topics. It's important to understand that if you run "Find Topics" multiple times on the same dataset, the suggested topics may vary slightly between runs. This is intentional and allows for a more comprehensive exploration of your data’s potential topics.
• Nuances in summarization
  Similarly, when generating summaries for your topics, slight variations can occur even when the underlying data and topic parameters (name and description) remain unchanged. For this reason, you may get slightly different results when clicking the refresh summary icon. While the core content of these summaries will be very similar, the specific wording may differ.
• For those interested in generative AI
  MAXQDA Tailwind utilizes large language models (LLMs) set to a low temperature of 0.1 (at least in the Beta phase). This setting aims to achieve a balance between consistent, high-quality output and subtle variations that can enhance diversity, reflecting the complexities of qualitative data analysis.
• Responsible AI
  Tailwind is committed to the responsible use of AI. Therefore, if the analyzed data includes content flagged as harmful, the generative AI model may be unable to generate topic suggesitions and summaries.

🌈 Data Security

At MAXQDA, we take data protection very seriously. For more information on how we manage and safeguard your data, please visit our Data Protection Policy page.

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