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Ontario’s SMA2’s Automated Textual Analysis

I’m a fan of Voyant Tools for web-based text reading and analysis. If you are looking for a search engine for SMA2, this is it.

Open in a new tab The corpus includes all 21 University 2017-2020 SMAs.

If you are looking for a search engine for SMA2, this is it. You can search/filter the SMAs by a key term the boxes in the lower portion of the Documents or Context panel. Searching “International” in the context panel yields some interesting results.

I further broke them down to look at these individual sections:

  1. Vision, Mission and Mandate
  2. Student Experience
  3. Innovation in Teaching and Learning Excellence
  4. Access and Equity
  5. Research Excellence
  6. Impact Innovation, Economic Development and Community Engagement

Initially, I looked at each sections’ length in the number of words used to describe it and its relative size to the whole document.

Reviewing the lengths you can see that some universities wrote much more than others. Most sections are of similar proportions to the whole document, however, there are exceptions:

  • OCADu and Ryerson have larger Vission, Mission, Mandate sections
  • The Université de Hearst’s Innovation in Teaching and Learning sections
  • There is also a lot of variation in the number of sub-sections, but that appears to only indicate a difference in structure, not amount or type of content. The only trend being there are more examples given in sections with more words and more sections.
UniversityNumber of words WITH boilerplateNumber of words WITHOUT boilerplate
University of Windsor1595616685
Lakehead University1572116435
York University1192212648
Carleton University1115111874
University of Ottawa1068611416
Queen's University1007110695
University of Guelph986910590
Trent University92089935
Western University91899893
Wilfrid Laurier University89989706
University of Waterloo89669696
Algoma University88419555
Ryerson University88539410
Brock University80378812
Laurentian University74948219
Université de Hearst74388148
University of Ontario Institute of Technology74088128
Nipissing University73678094
OCADu71547881
McMaster University64457173
University of Toronto63587093

Read how the themes in the text differentiate, or do not differentiate, each university in the How Universities Describe Themselves in SMA2 post.