4. 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 tab “Query”, choose “Word Frequency”.
• Choose sources: Choose one, several or all of the speeches, set a minimum word length (e.g., 4), and set display words at 100. Click "Run Query".
• Visualise: Click the tab “Word Cloud” (just above the world list).
• 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”.
  NVivo is by default set to English (US) as text content language and has quite an extensive built-in list of stop words for English. If you wish to work with other languages, you will first need to change the text content language. For some languages, NVivo has built-in stop word lists. For others, such as Danish, you will have to create your own.
  To change language settings, go to "File">"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. (A limited list of Danish stop words is available in the course files section.)
  You can also see another way of adding stop words HERE Links to an external site..
  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 speeches to see the difference in use of language.