Thematic Analysis

Thematic analysis groups what your sources are saying into themes — recurring concepts, patterns, or framings that cut across multiple papers. It's a standard qualitative technique and a natural fit for the mindmap.

When to use it

  • You have a corpus of qualitative or mixed-method papers and want to see what's recurring.
  • You're synthesizing interview, ethnographic, or case-study work.
  • You're trying to find structure in a body of claims that resist a clean chronological or methodological organization.

It's the right workflow when the question is "what are people talking about?" more than "who's right?"

Step 1 — Generate candidate themes

Don't start from your own guesses. Ask the agent to look at the corpus first:

Read across the project's KB and propose 5–8 recurring themes in how authors discuss the Late Bronze Age collapse. For each theme, give a short label, a 1–2 sentence definition, and the papers that engage with it.

The agent runs a broad pass and returns candidate themes — typically as a list, not yet attached to a mindmap structure.

Step 2 — Curate the theme set

Review what the agent surfaced:

  • Merge themes that are obviously the same idea wearing different labels.
  • Split themes that bundle two distinct ideas.
  • Drop themes you don't find useful for your analysis.
  • Add themes the agent missed that you know to be important.

A useful theme set is usually 4–7 themes. More than that and the analysis flattens.

Step 3 — Build the thematic map

Create a top-level node per theme and ask the agent to populate each one:

For each of these themes, create a subtree. Under each theme, add claims from the KB illustrating how authors engage with it. Include disagreements as sibling nodes.

The Researcher pulls citations per theme; the Editor lays them out. Selection scoping helps here — do one theme at a time if you want tighter focus per pass.

Step 4 — Look for cross-theme patterns

Themes rarely exist in isolation. The interesting structure is usually in the relationships:

Looking across these themes, identify pairs that frequently co-occur in the same papers, and pairs that appear to be in tension. For each, create a node summarizing the relationship and citing the relevant works.

These cross-theme nodes often become the most useful part of the analysis — they're where the interpretation lives.

Step 5 — Define and refine

For each theme, write a definition that fixes its meaning for your work:

  • Open the theme's root node and write a clear definition as the node's own claim.
  • The definition is your call, not the agent's — themes are interpretive constructs.

Once defined, ask the agent to check fit:

Re-evaluate the claims under each theme against the definition I've written. Flag any that don't fit and suggest where they might belong instead.

Step 6 — Report

A thematic analysis is usually written up in roughly the order of the map: themes, then cross-theme relationships, then interpretation. See Outlining a Paper for restructuring the map into a draft outline.

Tips

  • Coding is iterative. Expect to merge, split, and rename themes several times. The mindmap makes this cheap — you're not rewriting prose, just moving nodes.
  • Resist over-fragmenting. Five strong themes beat twelve weak ones.
  • Theme names matter. "Power" is too thin to do real work; "Asymmetric power between palace centers and peripheral communities" is a theme you can defend.

What's next