Creating Word Clouds

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 to access a word cloud include:

• Load a document and select the Analyze > Word Frequencies option in the editor ribbon, followed by clicking the Cloud icon.
• Opening the Search & Code tab, then selecting the Word Frequencies option in the ribbon, followed by clicking the Cloud icon.

When you hover 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

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 Frequencies Ribbon

The Word Frequencies ribbon provides several options:

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

Cloud/List/Treemap: The tool will analyse the selected data and returns the results in the form of a word cloud, a word list, or a tree map.

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: 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.

Tools: The following options are available:

• 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:

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.

Export: The following options are available:

• Excel: You can export the results of the word list as Excel table. There are limits in terms of how much data can be meaningfully processed or moreover handled by and displayed in Excel. Assuming there are 2000 unique words in a document, and you process 100 documents, this results in an Excel table consisting of 200.000 cells.

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

View: The following options are available:

• Show Details: Display of the word counts of each document if you have selected multiple documents.

• Show Percent: Display the relative frequency of each word (word count relative to the total number of words in the document / all selected documents).

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

Context Menu Options

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

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

The option Hide 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.