The following graphs aim to examine Chinese Rotarians‘ varying degree of involvement in the club, based on their presence in newspaper reports of Rotary meetings. The tabulated data we used for obtaining the graphs is available in the "Tables" section.
Our method for measuring the degree of participation into the club consisted in three steps:
- We built a subcorpus that contains all the press articles dealing with the Rotary Club of Shanghai.
- Relying on advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques - especially name entity recognition (NER) - we extracted from this corpus the names of persons mentioned in connection with the club.
- We identified Chinese Rotarians among the entites extracted and we counted the number of times they appeared (occurrences) or the number of articles (documents) in which they were mentioned, which corresponds to their respective “activity index”.
The two first graphs show the top 10 and 20 Rotarians mentioned in the press, ranked by decreasing number of occurrences. The two additional graphs retain ambiguous cases, providing a confidence index for ranking the same individuals (top 15 and 20).
Building on this activity index, three major groups emerged: eleven “highly active” Rotarians (over 10 occurrences, with Fong Sec. leading far ahead with 75 occurrences), eight “moderately active” (5 to 10), and twenty-two “less active” members (under 5 occurrences). We should add to this list the 67 members who never appeared in newspapers and therefore can be considered as “inactive” or “invisible” members.
Unsurprisingly, the varying degree of activity is directly correlated to their service in the club, i.e. the number of and the level of positions they took in Rotary. The index partly reflects the roles that members were expected to play according to the by-laws. For instance, the president was supposed to chair every meeting, and this largely accounts for the high scores of the three presidents Fong, Chu and Jee. The constitution, however, does not explain everything. Our findings reveal irregular cases that point to either discrepancies between the rules and their application, or to inevitable gaps in the available documentation. For instance, president Tan lags far behind less prominent members. Conversely, Wellington Koo, an honorary member who never took any positions in the club and barely attended its regular meetings, nonetheless ranks high on the list.
| 
