Transboundary E-waste

Scholarly debates over time.

Like all controversies, the issue of transboundary movements of e-waste changes with time. We used Voyant, a free scholarly text analysis tool, to help track and visualize changes in the scholarly debates about transboundary movements of e-waste. Below is a single view available using Voyant. Users can access a full Voyant dashboard for the data where many other analysis options are available by clicking here. A guide for using Voyant is available here.

The word cloud below provides a quick visual summary of the most frequently occurring words in the dataset. It provides an unedited frequency count of those words (users can edit parameters such as list of words Voyant will ignore to curate their own words clouds and other analyses in Voyant). The appearance "electronic" and "waste" in the word cloud are not in themselves surprising since they constitute part of the search terms used to develop the dataset of scholarly literature. It is, instead, what other words these terms are associated with in the dataset that helps us get a sense of the terrain of scholarly literature on transboundary movement of e-waste. Notable, for example is "recycling" which appears as the third most frequently used term after "electronic" and "waste".



The visualization below compares words found in the citation data of scholarly literature (the same data as used elsewhere in the controversy map, see here for a full description of these data). In this case, we selected words that highlight how the conversation about transbounday movements has become predominantly focused on recycling, rather than issues related to 'upstream' activities such as design or manufacturing. We also note that discussions of producer responsibility receive substantially less attention than does recycling.



We encourage users to explore their own analyses of these data through Voyant. Users can do so using the panels depicted on this page or open a full dashboard of the data here. Any words that appear in the dataset can be compared to one another in a wide variety of ways that will help get a sense of the terrain (e.g., How does "basel" or "basel convention" [capitalization not necessary] operate within the data?).

Note that it is possible to export any particular visualization of interest (if this page is reloaded it will return to the default views depicted above). If users wish to export a specific view, place the cursor in top right corners of the blue or grey bars of the visualization. Doing so will enable export tools to appear. For more detailed help with Voyant, access its guide here.

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