8. Word Frequency analysis and Word Clouds

By using word frequency analysis, you can perform basic content analyses and have them visualised with word clouds. 

How to perform Word Frequency analysis: 

• In the Ribbon View, choose tab “Explore”, choose “Word Frequency”.
• Choose sources: Choose one, several or all of the files, by clicking on "Selected Items", set a minimum word length (e.g., 5), and set display words at 100 most frequent. Click "Run Query". 

Visualise your search: Click the tab “Word Cloud” to the far right hand side of the listed words. The word cloud can take a while to load. 

Add “Stop Words”: When performing a Word Frequency Query, irrelevant words (noise) will sometimes appear in the results. i.e., words without semantic meaning relevant to your search. These words can be removed by adding them to the so-called “stop words”. Right click on a word in your word cloud to add it to the Stop Word list.

NVivo has quite an extensive built-in list of stop words for the default languages (English US, English UK, French, German, Chinese, Japanese and Spanish). If you wish to work with other languages, such as Danish, you will first need to change the text content language to "other" and create your own "Stop word list". 

• To change language settings, go to "File" on the Ribbon View >"Project Properties". Change context language to the correct language (or to "Other", if the language is not available). 
  Click the "Stop Words..."-button. If you have chosen a language available in NVivo, you will see a list of the stop words. If you have chosen "Other", an empty document will appear. Here, you can add your own stop words.  
• After changing text content language or adding stop words, you will have to re-run your query. 

Contrasting: Try performing the same Query on separate articles to see the difference in use of language and inspiration to new codes (themes).