Using History and Data Visualization to Change a Foundation's Mission
The other class I'm taking this semester besides @phillyhistory's Nonprofit Management is Digital History.
We're learning about maps, timelines, and even podcasts as tools to make history clearer and more engaging for those outside of academia. My favorite part of the course so far has been learning about free data visualization tools. Discussing the pros and cons of various types of data visualization is worthy of its own post(s). For now, I wanted to tell you all about a neat opportunity I've had this semester to apply my new skills outside of class.
My girlfriend works for a fancy foundation
It's based out of my hometown of Sarasota, Florida. It was founded in the 1940s with $3 million from a local family of boosters. The family established the foundation with a mission centered around supporting college education opportunities for local students. The foundation continues to fulfill this mission with a focus on providing scholarships. More recently, however, the staff and the board have started brainstorming ways to expand the mission. But it's not so simple.
Family foundations are intended to fulfill the will of the founding family. In this case, however, there are no surviving family members. Thus, expanding the foundation's mission is a challenge. Any alteration would have to be presented to the board with proof that it still fulfills the family's wishes. This is where history comes in.
Main Street Sarasota in 1938, a few years before the foundation was established. Courtesy of Sarasota History Alive
While no family members are left to explain their values, they did leave behind traces. Specifically, the foundation has over 100 copies of board meeting minutes attended by one of the foundation's founders when she was still alive. The hope is that within these thousands of pages, there may be evidence of her interests beyond education scholarships.
And now, this is where data visualization comes in
After downloading text-searchable digitizations of all of the board meeting minutes, I ran them through the free program, Voyant. Voyant analyzes all of the text to produce various visualizations, including a word cloud. The word cloud provides a visualization of the words that most commonly appear in the uploaded texts.
Unsurprisingly, the most common words in the minutes were related to education, such as "scholarship," "student," "application," and "recipient." But the point of the project is to find what came up besides education. I was able to narrow down the search by updating Voyant's stop list. This is a list of words that I don't want the program to consider. After I removed many of the education-related terms from consideration, I was left with this word cloud:
While plenty of the words are still ambiguous/seemingly related to scholarships, I was intrigued by the prominence of “science,” “hospital,” “research,” and “medical.” I then used a different tool in Voyant to see how often these phrases appeared in the files chronologically:
Science and hospital were especially consistent over time, providing evidence that they refer to an ongoing interest of the foundation when its founders were still alive.
This work is still in its very early stages, but I've been told that the foundation's board is impressed.
I hope you forgive my deviation from the @phillyhistory initiative! Regardless,
Sounds like a reasonable start. If I were a board member, though, I'd want to also see a compelling collection of the exact quotes using the words “science,” “hospital,” “research,” and “medical.” After all, frequency does not always equal intent!