Posted on: June 21, 2019 / Categories: Uncategorized
I’m a bit of a data Junkie (data diva is the new term I’ve just been turned on to, :)), but other than standardized test scores most of my professional world is a world of words: Policies, books, writing samples, emails, etc. So, when I think of visualizing data, my thoughts have been confined to the numerical data collected, normally at the end of a school year (an autopsy, if you will). BUT NO MORE! Now my eyes have been opened to the exciting world of Voyant Tools where I can use the textual world in which I live daily to draw conclusions and make decisions.
For my first adventure in Voyant, I am comparing the information found in three separate websites or articles related to the use of restorative practices within schools to bring about changes in discipline. I hope you find this as informative and exciting as I did.
For the purpose of this project, I am comparing three website articles on the topic of Restorative Practices in Schools. One article is from the International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP) Webpage. This article is called Defining Restorative in my graphics. One is from the Getting Smart Website. This one is called Implementing Restorative Practices, and the final one is from WikiPedia and it will be referenced as simply Restorative Practices. The article that came from the IIRP webpage was a bit longer and seemed to have more terminology than the other two.
A look at the textual content of these three articles revealed several things to me. There is the obvious usage of the terms restorative, practices, preventative, etc., all the terms you would expect to find in these types of articles. By hovering over the terms you can see the number of times each one is used cumulatively in the articles.
http:// https://voyant-tools.org/tool/Cirrus/?corpus=bf63f8ff280f8ad1fb62854326cb4996
But as I dug deeper into the words, I recognized that that one entity that was referenced over and over, which may come as a surprise since the articles were all about Restorative Practices in SCHOOLS, was family. This brought out the relationship between the family and the school in the implementation of these practices. You can see that in some articles (those that are more about a description of the practices, not about the implementation) family is not used as often. But when the article referred more to the successful implementation of these types of programs, family becomes a key word.
Another analysis of these terms by article gives a clearer picture of which articles include the family unit as an important part of the implementation of Restorative Practices in schools. Use the drop down box below to highlight the terms family and school to see a clearer view of this.
Here you see that the article from the GetSmart Website places NO EMPHASIS on the family as an entity that is relevant or important in the implementation of Restorative Practices in schools. The WikiPedia article has some emphasis on family while the IIRP webpage shows a more even distribution of the term family in their description of implementation of Restorative Practices.
Another interesting theme I found as I analyzed this data was how little the term education was used when discussing the implementation of Restorative Practices in schools. If you scroll over the word education in the graphic below, you can see that that it is only linked to a few other terms in the articles and is not used as often as I would have thought in this type of discussion. You can also note similarities with other terms by hovering over the term you’d like to compare.
So I hope you find, as I did, that an analysis of words can be just as fun and invigorating as the same type of analysis of numbers. Maybe even moreso, since you have to be a word detective to truly find meaning in this type of project.