Creating Word Clouds

To create a word cloud for documents or codes or quotations select one or more items e.g. in the Project Explorer or in the respective manager.

In the Project Explorer, right-click and select the option Word Cloud. In a manager, select the Word Cloud option from the ribbon.

You can always add or remove more items of the same entity type to the cloud or list, once the word cloud has been created.

Other options are:

  • to load a document first and select the Word Cloud button in the ribbon.
  • to open a manager and select the Word Cloud button in the ribbon.
  • You can also access the Word List / Word Cloud via the Search & Code tab.

When you select to create a word cloud from one or multiple codes, the word cloud shows the words of the quotations coded with the selected code(s). If you want your list of codes to be displayed in form of a cloud, you need to select the View tab in the Code Manager and from there the option 'Cloud'. The size of the codes in the Code Cloud is related to its frequency. See Working with Codes.

Word Cloud showing frequency for a word

When you hoover over a word, its frequency is shown (= token / number of occurrences of a unique word).

Setting the Scope

Once you created a word cloud, you see a side panel on the left. The check-boxes of the currently active entities are checked. You can check further entities or uncheck already activated entities.

You can also change the entity type. Options are to change between:

  • documents
  • document groups
  • codes
  • code groups
  • quotations

Change entity type

Another scope option is to enter a search term into the search field to look for a specific document, code, or quotations that only contain specific words.

World Cloud Ribbon

The Word Cloud ribbon provides several options:

Show Scope: You can activate or deactivate the side panel that allows you to select the scope.

Spiral: Display of the words in a spiral (default).

Typewriter: Display of words from left to right. You can select whether to list the words in alphabetic order, by frequency of occurrence of by word length in either ascending or descending order.

Sorting: The word cloud can be sorted in alphabetical order, by frequency or word length.

Threshold: My moving the slider from left to right, you can determine that only words with a certain frequency are displayed. The number of the left-hand side shows the lowest, the number on the right-hand side the highest occurring frequency.

Exclude: You can exclude single character words, numbers, hyphens and underscores.

Stop / Go Lists: To exclude particular words, you can select stop lists. If only certain words should be displayed, you can create a Go List. See the section on "Stop and Go Lists" below.

Image: You can save a word cloud as graphic file (.jpg).

Filter

  • Ignore Case: Select this option, if you do not want to count words separately depending on whether they contain upper or lower case letters.

  • Infer base forms: The plural forms of nouns, the past tense, past participle, and present participle forms of verbs, and the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives and adverbs are known as inflected forms. If you activate this options, the word cloud only shows the basic form of the word, e.g. building but not buildings.

  • Parts of Speech: This options allows you to filter your data by specific grammatical elements (parts of speech) like adjectives, nouns, numerals, pronouns, etc. Below you see an example that only shows adjectives:

Word cloud filtered by parts of speech

Filter Tab

Word Cloud Filter tab

Character Filter: In this section you can enter special characters that you do not want to be counted and displayed in the word cloud. By default, the following characters are excluded:

|"(){}[]<>/#+-_%$&“”´`@^‘„

You can select whether these characters should generally be removed or only at word ends.

If you add or remove characters, or deactivate the restriction to word ends, you can click on the Reload button. This updates the word cloud.

Context Menu Options

When you right-click on a word, you have the following options:

  • Remove from Word Cloud
  • Add to Stop List
  • Copy to Clipboard
  • Search in Context

Word Cloud context menu options

The option Remove from Word Cloud temporarily removes the word from the cloud.

If you have selected a stop list (see below), you can add more words to it. The option will be grayed out as shown in the image above, if no stop list has been selected yet.

The Copy to Clipboard option is useful, if you want to run the auto coding tool based on some words in the word cloud. See Text Search.

The Search in Context option opens the Project Search and shows the selected word in its context.

Showing a word in context