MAXQDA Tailwind Topics

Identifying Topics

The $Topics dashboard icon$ Topics dashboard is where you can create and manage your MAXQDA Tailwind project’s topics. On this page, you’ll learn how to create, manage, and review topics in MAXQDA Tailwind to explore your data and generate AI-powered topic summaries for your analysis.

🔬Adding topics

After importing files into your project, you can analyze them in the Topics dashboard. Each project can contain up to 20 topics. There are two ways to add topics: manually or by using AI-generated suggestions. Here’s how you can do both:

Manually adding topics

You can manually add topics one at a time:

This screenshot shows the manual topic creation window with the topic name and topic description fields

Navigate to the Topics dashboard using the sidebar navigation.
Click Add Topic.
In the dialog that appears, enter the name of the topic you wish to analyze across your data. You can optionally add a topic description to enhance analysis and improve results.
When ready, click Add Topic, or Cancel to abort.

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

Generating AI topic suggestions

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

Navigate to the Topics dashboard using the sidebar navigation.
Click Find Topics. Tailwind will analyze your data and extract relevant topics based on the topic name, description, and content of the imported files. This may take some time, depending on the size of your data.
A pop-up displaying the identified topics and short descriptions will appear; see the image to the right.
Choose the topics you want to add by checking the boxes next to them.
After making your selections, click Add Topics. Alternatively, you can click Cancel to abort.
The topics you choose will be added, and summaries will be created for each one.

For an overview of the MAXQDA Tailwind interface, please visit our “Getting Started” page, where we cover the basics of navigating the web app.

Topics and their summaries

After completing either process, MAXQDA Tailwind adds topics as tiles in the $Topics dashboard icon$ Topics dashboard for your review, see below:

📇 Managing topic tiles

Each topic tile includes the following elements:

Topic Name: The title of the topic.
Description: A brief description providing additional details about the topic.
Topic Summary: An AI-generated summary by MAXQDA Tailwind.

You can do the following:

Edit name and description:
- Click the topic name or description to modify it.
- To save your edits, click the Done icon that appears once you click the field.
- To cancel or discard your changes, click the Delete icon.
Copy the AI-generated summary:
- Click the Copy icon to copy the summary to the clipboard.
Regenerate a topic summary:
- You can regenerate a topic summary by clicking on Refresh.

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.

Deleting a topic

Click the More options icon and then click Delete to delete it permanently.

Important:

Please be aware that deleting a topic cannot be undone, and topics cannot be restored once they have been deleted.
You can only delete a topic if it is not used in Summary Tables. MAXQDA Tailwind will notify you if the topic is in use.
- In this case, you first need to delete the summary table(s) where it’s included. Then, you can return to the $Topics dashboard icon$ Topics dashboard to delete the topic.

Exporting topics

To export topics in Excel format, click the Export button and select the desired export location on your device.

Interactive references to the original data

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

Click on a document reference in a topic summary.
The “Document View” panel will slide open, displaying:
- AI Summary (top): Provides an overview of the document. Click any reference to see where that information comes from.
  - You can use the Copy to Clipboard icon to copy the entire summary.
- Original Document (below): Automatically scrolls and highlights the matching text in green when you click a reference in the summary above, as seen in the image on the left.
To close the “Document View,” click the Close icon located in the panel’s upper right corner.

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

Dynamic topic suggestions:
When you use the Find Topics button, 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 the potential topics in your data.
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. Although the core content of these summaries will be largely similar, the specific wording may vary.
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 suggestions and summaries.