Pardee Center Publishes New Report for Rockefeller Searchlight Project

The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University has published a new research report for a project sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Connecting the Dots: Information Visualization and Text Analysis of the Searchlight Project Newsletters was produced by the Pardee Center as part of a larger Rockefeller Foundation “Searchlight” project. The larger project seeks to analyze and disseminate on-the-ground information about important societal trends as reported in a large number of regional newsletters developed in Asia, Africa and the Americas specifically for the Foundation. The Pardee Center developed sophisticated methods to systematically review, categorize, analyze, visualize, and draw conclusions from the information in the newsletters.

Connecting the Dots describes the methodology the Pardee Center team used for the project and also identifies and discusses global trends of significance to the future drawn from the regional newsletters, including: differing perceptions of climate change and the responses to it among developed and developing countries; urbanization trends in South Asia versus southern Africa; and an increased emphasis on “social resiliency” in developing countries and the factors related to that trend.

The research was led by Pardee Faculty Fellow Suchi Gopal and former Pardee Center Director Adil Najam. Prof. Gopal is the lead author of the report.

More information about the Pardee Center’s work on this project is available in the research section of this web site.

The report is available in PDF format here. Hard copies may be requested via email to pardee@bu.edu