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Researcher(s):
Julia Revier Scotti Reed Daphne Yuen
ENVS course(s): 220 Initiated: November 2014 Completed: December 2014 Go to project site
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Despite an unsavory history of zoos, modern zoos and their visitors emphasize conservation as their main priority (Roe et al. 2014). Zoos are also an important educational resource for children who are easily impressionable and susceptible to values, such as conservation and respect for wildlife (Jensen 2014). This means that these organizations have incredible power in teaching and educating the public of the need for conservation and preservation of habitats. However, zoos are able to function more than just sources of education. For instance, they may also act as research facilities, animal management, and conservation promoters (Fa et al. 2011). Many institutions have been experienced successful breeding programs, genomic sequencing, and reintroduction campaigns (Darce 2011, Rees 2011, Martin et al. 2012). Considering these achievements, it is likely that zoos are effective actors in promoting conservation. However, we chose to examine the specific actions and policies of the Oregon Zoo to thoroughly exemplify one facility. We seek to describe their projects, research, funding allocation, and education efforts to set the foundation for evaluating their program.
Questions
Framing: Are zoos effective actors of conservation?
Focus: What are the conservation-related actions, programs, and policies of the Oregon Zoo?
Methodology:
Our extensive outcome is a Gephi social network map of the Oregon Zoo’s research partners, demonstrating how strongly each organization is affiliated with the zoo and illustrates their locations and type of organization. We overlaid this social network onto Google Earth so that we can spatially visualize where these partners are. This was not easy as technology is buggy and frustrating and not willing to cooperate with what we were telling it to do.
Our procedure for making this map was first to look up all or most of the research partners of the Oregon Zoo and manually enter in their names, program, locations, type of organization, AZA certification, latitude and longitude. We eventually came up with 40 organizations that are affiliated with the Oregon Zoo through research programs. This first spreadsheet was our nodes table. Then we composed our edges table including the strength of affiliation with the zoo and targeted them towards the zoo. After we made these spreadsheets we exported them as Windows.csv files and imported them into the Gephi application. When we entered in our data we saw a centralized social network in the Overview screen. Then we downloaded the Geo Layout and Export to Earth plugins so we could export our network as a KMZ file. When exporting this is where we ran into the bulk of our issues. Gephi would not recognize our geocoding as locations and refused to export our network. After much searching on internet forums and a call to my computer genius brother, Daphne finally and beautifully worked out the bugs and our network exported as a KMZ file.
Once our file was exported we changed the color of the types of organizations and the size of our connection lines in Gephi so that the network would show the connections we wanted to demonstrate in Google Earth. Then we opened the network in Google Earth and saved the file.
We came to these outcomes by first examining the Oregon Zoo’s website by exploring each menu item in the header of the website and analysing their contents. While exploring the website we kept in mind the three main components of narrative analysis: selection, sequencing, and moral. Selection being what the website chooses to include and what not to include, Sequencing defined as the order of content, and Moral is the message that the site or organization is trying to send. Once we explored the site keeping these concepts in mind, we then looked up other zoos’ websites for comparison, such as the Denver Zoo and the Woodland Park Zoo. We compared and contrasted the Oregon Zoo with these other zoos, analyzing the Oregon Zoo based off of the other zoos’ content. When we felt that there was nothing left to analyze we did a narrative analysis of the Oregon Zoo’s website in its entirety to figure out what its intent, or moral is towards its audience. This analysis can be found here.
As a supplementary visual for our narrative analysis we created a word cloud using Wordle to visualize the words that the Oregon Zoo uses most on its website. To create this map we copied and pasted text from the zoo’s website into the text box and the site put these words into a picture with word size being determined by how many times it was used in the text. We eliminated common words in the English language, such as, “it,” “the,” and “and.” This word cloud helps us visualize what the zoo believes is most important based off of how many times they use certain words on their website.
These intensive outcomes help us grasp what is central and important to the Oregon Zoo in terms of conservation and its main functions. Our social network map provides the broad background for this narrative analysis, we are now linguistically examining the relationships and connections presented in our map.
Results:
Our results were almost exclusively visual. Visit our website for these outcomes.