The Humanitarian Encyclopedia Dashboard is a tool for studying ReliefWeb's collection of humanitarian reports with corpus linguistics. This post explains how the tool can help identify trends in the evolution and emergence of key humanitarian terminology using climate resilience as an example.
Tracking the latest concepts in humanitarian discourse
Effective communication is essential for collaboration among humanitarian actors, affected populations and other stakeholders. However, different actors use different terminology to refer to the same things, and can disagree over the definitions and meanings of key terms. What does it mean to increase climate resilience or maintain independence? What debates surround these concepts and what lessons have been learned so far? The Humanitarian Encyclopedia online platform offers a space to learn about and discuss such issues. Its new Dashboard tool draws on ReliefWeb’s database to facilitate an evidence-based approach to the study of humanitarian discourse.
Introducing the Humanitarian Encyclopedia Dashboard
One way to better understand how humanitarian organizations communicate is through corpus linguistics, a fast-growing methodology that focuses on analyzing patterns among large data sets of texts. The Humanitarian Encyclopedia uses corpora to study concepts and discourse. To improve our methods and make them accessible to others we developed the Humanitarian Encyclopedia Dashboard, a web application that visualizes data from large collections of humanitarian documents.
The Dashboard includes full-text content of ReliefWeb reports in three languages: English, French and Spanish (about 1 million texts and 2 billion words). Users can query ReliefWeb content to view trends in humanitarian discourse and conduct analyzes using the Sketch Engine corpus linguistics software. Let’s study the term climate resilience to see how the Dashboard works.
Trends over time
Climate resilience is a type of resilience, which is defined as an "ability to endure stresses and shocks."(1) If we make a Dashboard query for resilience in ReliefWeb's English content, we can see how the word has become much more common since 2011. Compare this rising trend to the one for development, which is used much more frequently but is quite stable over time.(2)
Trends by language
Next let's look at the frequency of climate resilience over time, including its most direct French and Spanish translations, résilience climatique and resiliencia climática. We can see that the terms start gaining popularity around 2010.*(3) *
Trends by country
Clearly, the idea of becoming more resilient to climate change has recently expanded, but these data are still generic. Let's see how the frequency of climate resilience changes by country.
The top countries mentioned in relation to climate resilience have much higher relative frequencies than the rest. These include Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Saint Lucia and Palau. The pattern is clear: humanitarian documents have a strong focus on island states when discussing this topic.
Trends by country and organization
To narrow the focus even more, let's check which organizations contribute to the discussion of climate resilience for a particular country, say Dominica. About a dozen organizations have a big presence on the topic for this country. These include the Inter-American Development Bank and the Government of Dominica, but also the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States and the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency.
Studying text data
Now let's shift away from quantitative data and look at the texts themselves. Clicking on data points in the Dashboard generates links to an interface for Sketch Engine, a corpus management software that's popular among researchers, translators and lexicographers. If we search for the phrase climate resilience is, click on the data point for Ethiopia, and view the results in Sketch Engine, we see each line of text with (196 cases overall and 18 for Ethiopia).
Among these sentences we find statements about the nature of climate resilience and a candidate definition, which defines climate resilience as “the capacity for a socio-ecological system to: (1) absorb stresses and maintain function in the face of external stresses imposed upon it by climate change and (2) adapt, reorganize, and evolve into more desirable configurations that improve the sustainability of the system, leaving it better prepared for future climate change impacts”.
Each sentence is also tagged with metadata provided by ReliefWeb's API, including a link to the original document, all of which can be utilized for further analysis. For example, by disaggregating the trends by organization type, we can begin to classify groups of organizations with common vocabularies that might benefit from deeper collaboration. Similarly, by analyzing linguistic patterns showing the emergence of concepts over time, we can attempt to predict and anticipate future priorities.
With the Dashboard’s interactive charts and access to all the sentences that include climate resilience (over 15,000), we can start studying the concept in depth. For a typical report on a Humanitarian Encyclopedia concept we'll make dozens of queries to discover definitions, subtypes, debates, lessons learned, related concepts, synonyms, etc. We'll also look at trends based on year, country, organization types and other metadata.
Final thoughts
While there's a lot to keep in mind for doing corpus linguistics rigorously, we find this approach a great way to provide quantifiable and traceable evidence that can inform humanitarian actors’ understanding of a concept. We'd like to make this a transparent process and keep it open for the greater community as well. If you'd like to do research with ReliefWeb or similar content, give the Dashboard a try and contact our team at the Humanitarian Encyclopedia.
Notes
- https://humanitarianencyclopedia.org/concept/resilience
- These bar charts show relative frequency for each year, i.e., how often the term appears for every one million words of text. In 2000, resilience appeared about 5 times per million words, whereas by 2016 it surpassed 300 - a more than 60-fold increase.
- Data for 2023 currently only include the first half of the year, up to the end of June.
About the authors
- Loryn Isaacs, Linguist, Humanitarian Encyclopedia, University of Granada
- Alex Odlum, Research Coordinator, Humanitarian Encyclopedia, Geneva Centre of Humanitarian Studies