Each garden and nearby green space supported by the TKF Foundation includes an iconic bench. A specially created waterproof, blank book and pen combination – located beneath the bench – invites visitors to an Open Space Sacred Place to articulate their experience. Readers can follow updates on new benches and journal entries at #benchstories.
Visitors share words or images of the experience of being in the space. More than a simple diary, record, or log of daily events, each journal is a collection of inspiring thoughts and reflections that attest to our need for opportunities to connect with each other and be in nature.
The Landscapes of Resilience Project Team conducted a preliminary analysis of over 10,000 of these journal entries collected from multiple sites from the years 2000 to 2010. This preliminary analysis (in 2012) served to inform the team’s current work. Text was analyzed using a semantic mapping program that generates ‘concept maps’. These concept maps show the frequency of words used across these journals and how they are connected to each other.
Eleven themes (common and connected words) emerged from the journal entries. People often wrote about their day, love, God, life and time. It is easy and fulfilling to imagine each person taking a pause from their day to sit down and appreciate the greater meaning in their lives.
Taking the project a step further, the team generated concept maps specific to themes of interest here at Nature Sacred. For example, the word Bench is connected to Peace, Love, Today and many contextual words such as enjoy, sit, garden, home, water, and sun.
The most striking outcome of this type of content analysis is the centrality of the concept of Nature. The green mass at the center is ‘nature’. In people’s minds, and then transferred to paper, ‘Nature’ is connected to many meaningful thoughts, feelings, senses, and actions experienced by thousands of people pausing on a garden bench. Maps of other central concepts revealed less symmetrical connections.
Tidball, K., E.S. Svendsen, L.K. Campbell, N. Falxa-Raymond, and K. Wolf. 2012. Preliminary Analysis of TKF “Book & Bench” texts using unsupervised semantic mapping of natural language with Leximancer concept mapping. Cornell Blog, provided courtesy of author.
