What people around the world dream about - A deeper look into the dreams of the world.
The Hack for Earth Foundation organized the Dream for Earth campaign in collaboration with the Swedish Pavilion and the United Nations inviting the world to dream at Expo 2020. Everyone got invited to share their dreams for the future and be a part of the #dreamforearth movement. All the submitted dreams were also displayed in the Dream for Earth exhibition at Expo 2020 in Dubai.
Once the dreams were shared in the Dream for Earth campaign, we at Dcipher Analytics were invited to do a text and video transcript analysis study where we clustered and analyzed all the dreams to find out the most pressing challenges that citizens all around the world hope to resolve and goals that they would like to achieve.
If you're curious to know more about it, keep reading! However, just to give you an idea, the dreams primarily focus on increasing the collective good of society with a minimal share of personal dreams.
This blog post analyzes the dreams shared by people worldwide within the open Dream for Earth initiative. A total of 1056 dreams from 61 countries were analyzed, and video dreams were also transcribed into text. Natural language processing was used to analyze the content of the collected dreams, and dreams with similar content were clustered to reveal thematic and narrative patterns. Furthermore, metadata, particularly location and category, were also analyzed to reveal the geographic and thematic focus of the dreams.
The dreams were then categorized by the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to compare the SDGs that were the most popular. Among the 17 SDGs, Good Health and Well-being, Quality Education, and No Poverty were the top three SDGs with the most dreams.
Among the dreams categorized under Good Health and Well-being (SDG # 3), the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, Australia, Pakistan, and Switzerland were the most representative countries. This SDG comprised 34% of the overall dreams and within this SDG, there were three top narratives: becoming a doctor and treating diseases, access to clean water and adequate medical attention for children, and lastly, access to healthcare irrespective of financial status. These narratives represent the top three themes that the dreams comprised under the Good Health and Well-being SDG category.
Similarly, for the dreams categorized under Quality Education (SDG # 4), the countries with the highest share of dreams were Brazil, Pakistan, Malaysia, Tunisia, and China. This SDG contributed to 30% of the dreams, and also had the three most important themes: getting a dream education abroad or in a specialized field, access to education through digital platforms, and, lastly, high-quality education for everyone.
Lastly, among the dreams categorized under No Poverty (SDG # 1), Uganda, Nigeria, Nepal, Kenya, and Italy had the highest share of dreams. This SDG contributed to 28% of the dreams and also had three top narratives that represented the majority of the dreams under this SDG, namely: empowering the poor, equipping disadvantaged children with valuable skills, and lastly, a world without poverty and with equal access to education.
Even though this gives us a good idea regarding the essential SDGs that the majority of the dreams mentioned, looking at the most frequent themes across all the dreams is also necessary. Therefore, using the natural language processing techniques of Dcipher Analytics, the dreams were clustered based on the similarity of their content. This resulted in clusters of dreams expressing similar narratives, often cutting across categories, corresponding to hills in the landscape below. These “metanarratives” emerging from the dreams can also be seen in the landscape, which organizes texts based on their semantic similarity to explore and identify themes in the text visually:
Among the metanarratives above, the top three with the most representation are education and braveness to tackle significant challenges, a collaborative mindset to tackle climate challenges, and community and service.
Overall, these dreams give us a good idea of the problems that people worldwide hope to resolve. And the focus is around increasing the collective benefit of society by tackling issues like climate change that affect us all alike. Since awareness of a problem is the first step towards its solution, we hope to spread the world's collective dreams among everyone and inspire our future leaders and changemakers to lead the way towards a roadmap that helps make these dreams come true. This will ultimately lead to accomplishing what the UN's SDGs hope to meet by 2030, so we can all create a better future for each other and subsequently transform the world.
Additionally, If you’d like to learn more regarding our previous studies and analyses, you can also check out our last blog posts for some interesting insights:
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Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails: what can we learn from a deep-dive with Natural Language Understanding?
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Find The Best Gift Ideas for this Father’s Day in 6 Quick & Easy Steps!
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