Charity/philanthropy: methodology for cartographic research of a social concept and a mock-up demonstration of its application

Abstract

In response to the growing flow of research in the context of knowledge transforming into a powerful factor of social change, there is a need for compact and economical forms of knowledge representation. The aim of this work is to develop principles for a cartographic representation of studies of various aspects of social concepts published in academic journals. The concept of charity/philanthropy was chosen as a test sample due to the pronounced ambiguity of its content and the presence of a number of its terminological designations. The methodological framework of the study is represented by the Foucauldian analysis of discourse formation and the theory of relationship between linguistic, mental and factual forms of social concepts. For a cartographic representation of distribution of meanings and elements of the concept, the PolyAnalyst platform and the VoSViewer software tool were used. The authors obtained the following results: (1) substantiated the presence of a coordinate markup as the main attribute of the cartographic representation of a social concept, and shown its difference from network visualization; (2) developed the methodology for determining the coordinate axes that ensure a meaningful reading and understanding of the map, based on identifying lines of tension in the discourse of the concept; (3) proposed the scheme for producing a cartographic overview of the social concept discourse and tested it using the example of charity/philanthropy; (4) identified the signs of a pragmatic turn in charity/philanthropy research; they are clearly identifiable in certain areas of the obtained map. The study makes it possible to obtain compact representations of distributions of elements of social concepts, to form pools of their homogeneous meanings for producing systematic reviews, developing research plans and determining directions of changes in relevant phenomena.

Keywords

• knowledge representation
• social concept
• meaning
• charity
• philanthropy
• social cartography
• big data