If you see a topic that interests you in a macroculture universe, click it, and add it as a microculture to explore it further in the context of the macroculture.

E.g. in the search below, the macroculture is gut health. From the topic universe, I have clicked on basic supplements to understand further how consumers think about supplements in the context of gut health. Now to explore this microculture, we'd simply need to click the Microculture button to the left and then click apply.

The resulting microculture topic universe will now show you the meanings consumers associate with supplements in the context of gut health. To arrive at this topic universe, our engine focuses on the specific part of the macroculture that relates to the chosen microculture. It's as if we told our engine to focus on the planet Saturn in our solar system and tell us everything we can find out about its rings, moons etc.

Navigating a microculture

The slider bar under the microculture heading provides a visual representation of the topic universe you are interested in. The topics (and meanings) most closely related to your topic of interest are found at the left-most side of the slider, while those further away are on the right.

For example, in the example below (”basic supplements” in the context of “gut health”), topics like "protein intake" and "enough b12" are much closer in semantic distance to the search term "gut health" than topics like "cutting dairy” or "removing toxins" as seen in the second screen capture.

The slider, therefore, provides a relative indication of the semantic distance (which can be better understood in relation to vector databases) of topics that are connected to your search of interest. This slider can serve as important tool when wanting to ensure that the most dominant meanings are captured first and foremost, especially when DIYing an analysis quickly.

So begin on the left end, and work your way to the right.

Interpreting topics

At a glance, in the example above, we can see that the meanings around basic supplements in the context of gut health revolve around consumers’ belief that they need supplements that complement the deficiencies of their diet, whether standard, keto, carnivore, whole foods, or plant-based. They don’t want to risk the side effects of taking random supplements - they want to cover their deficiencies with the right ones.