One of our main objectives in developing case studies is to share and link community innovations. This requires looking at the successful aspects of a community innovation, plan or initiative and also the challenges, barriers or issues communities faced in attempting to implement plans or execute projects. The visualization below captures these lessons through a meta-analysis of ‘What Worked’ and ‘What Didn’t Work’ sections of 53 on line CRC case studies.
How was this visualization created?
Concepts related to sustainable community development, derived through our coding framework, were used for this analysis. Concept prevalence within the text (i.e., number of occurrences) was calculated and plotted along the y-axis. Prevalence was then divided into two data sets - their occurrences in the ‘What Worked’ sections and their occurrences in the ‘What Didn’t Work’ sections. These data sets were compared with one another to create an index, and these values were then plotted along the x-axis. Concepts that had more prevalence in ‘What Worked’ have positive values between 0 and 1 (the 1 increment on the x-axis is labeled with ‘Successes’). Concepts that had more prevalence in ‘What Didn’t Worked’ have negative values between 0 and -1 (the -1 increment on the x-axis is thusly labeled with ‘Critical Needs’).
How do you read the visualization?
As an example of interpreting the visualization, ‘localization’ is a prevalent concept in all the case study text that appears more in the ‘What Didn’t Work’ than ‘What Worked’ sections, suggesting that local production and economy is a critical need in communities. In contrast, ‘stakeholder’ is a relatively prevalent concept that occurs more in the ‘What Worked’ sections, and thus a more in-depth analysis of the text might show stakeholder engagement and inclusion to be a common success in the innovations and plans examined in these case studies.
How do you interact with the visualization?
The visualization is an interactive Flash animation. You can scroll over any of the numbers and the concepts will appear. In addition, you can expand or collapse the legend in the top-right corner by using the respective ‘Click here to expand legend’ and ‘Click here to collapse legend’ functions in the legend box.
Click here to explore more CRC meta-analysis visualizations.