Faculty Fellow Suchi Gopal Discusses New Pardee Center Research Report

The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future on April 25 hosted a discussion led by Pardee Faculty Fellow Sucharita Gopal about the methods and findings of a recent Pardee Center Research Report titled Connecting the Dots: Information Visualization and Text Analysis of the Search Project Newsletters.

Prof. Gopal co-authored the report with former Pardee Center Dirctor Adil Najam, who is now the Vice Chancellor of the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan.  The report is part of a larger project sponsored by The Rockefeller Foundation that sought to extract and visually display major societal trends found in regional newsletters from around the globe on local issues related to human development.

Prof. Gopal reviewed the methods used to review more than 300 newsletters, catalog the topics covered, and determine whether the topics were related to larger trends in a particular region or even globally.  She also discussed the development of specific types of visual displays used in the report, including tree maps, histograms, box plots, and dashboards.

The report is available in PDF format at the publications section of this web site and hard copies may be requested by email to pardee@bu.edu