As excited as we are to be in the Saving Lives at Birth (SLAB) finals - for our Mobile Lotteries collaboration with the Population Council and Marie Stopes in Uganda - we’re also interested in studying the finalist field to spot innovation trends in maternal and newborn health. Unfortunately, the data we have on the 65 finalists looks like this. So we gave ourselves 60 minutes to make sense of the data.

Here’s what we decided to do: 1) use Outwit to scrape key finalist data from the SLAB site, 2) export and clean up the data, 3) manually tag all projects with their actual project location when available – vs. the location of the lead organization, and 4) visualize the data. After completing #1-3, we opted to visualize the data in a couple different ways.

Today’s post is the first visualization, generating a word cloud based on nearly 12,000 words worth of project descriptions to examine themes across projects. See image above, based on an export from Wordle.net (the font is Kenyan Coffee). Removed references to “health” to provide some more insight into the meaningful themes. Here are a few of the uncommon themes that we spotted: bCPAP – bubble CPAP for neonatal respiratory distress; PPH – innovations tackling postpartum hemorrhage; vouchers – reimbursing existing providers to offer targeted maternal health services to the poor; and chlorhexidine – postpartum umbilical cord care. Click on the image to view larger and explore the data.

Another visualization is on the way tomorrow. And all done in about an hour!

[Releasing the above image under the CreativeCommons Attribution-NoDerivs license.]