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 the respective document manager.

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.

Right-click and select the option Word Cloud.

Creating a word cloud for selected documents

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.

When you select to create a word cloud from codes, the word cloud shows the words of the quotations coded with the selected code(s).

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.

Setting the scope for a word cloud

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

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

Change entity type

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 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 (see the main manual)..

The Search in Context option opens the Project Search (see the main manual). and shows the selected word in its context.

Stop and Go Lists

Words in stop lists are words which are filtered out when processing text. Stop words are short function words that occur very often and which do not convey any particular meaning. Examples are 'the', 'a', 'you', 'is', 'at', 'on' and 'which'. ATLAS.ti offers predefined stop lists in 35 languages. These stop lists are based on the information provided by Ranks NL.

In contrast, if you set a word list as Go List, then only the words that are in the list are counted.

Selecting a Stop List

To select a stop list, click on the drop-down button for Exclude

Selecting a stop list

Below you see an example for a word cloud where a stop list was applied:

Word Cloud with applied stop list

Cleaning up a Word Cloud

In the word cloud above, there are still a lot of words that distract from the content of the interviews like all speaker IDs: INT, SHAZ, DEB, AL, STU.

You can either remove the words from the current cloud, or add the words the stop list. Then they are also not counted in other word clouds that you create later.

To remove a word from a word cloud temporarily, select the word, right-click and select "Rmove"

If you want to remove it from all word clouds permanently:

Right-click on a word and select Add to stop list.

Remove a word from a word cloud

The cleaned up word cloud might look as follows:

Cleaned up Word Cloud

You can modify existing stop and go lists or create your own. See the full manual for further information.