Tracking the Russian Flu in U.S. and German Medical and Popular Reports, 1889-1893
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
The project "Tracking the Russian Flu in U.S. and German Medical and Popular Reports, 1889-1893" examines US and German medical discussion and popular reporting during the Russian influenza epidemic, from its outbreak in late 1889 through the successive waves that lasted through 1893. To that end, it uses historical materials to develop, apply, and evaluate new methods for computational epidemiology through applications and explores research questions that connect themes central to humanities inquiry with the opportunities and challenges presented by the availability of digitized texts and advances in computational analysis: 1) How does the tone of reporting during a disease outbreak change in relation to variables such as proximity to reporting location, number of cases, categories of victims, and accumulating deaths? 2) How did newspapers and medical journals contribute to the narrative of the Russian flu, including the recognition of an outbreak, involvement of medical experts, attention to celebrity victims, the effort to shape public opinion, scope of opinions, and the response of authorities? 3) How accurate were predictions about the scope, impact, and significance of the Russian flu at distinct stages, by comparison to epidemiological data reported during and after the outbreak? In order to answer these research question, the first step was the creation of a corpus consisting of relevant German (Austrian) news articles from the relevant time frame. The corpus was created by digitizing physically archived newspapers supplied by the Austrian National Library (ANNO), performing optical character recognition (OCR) and finally semi-automatically correcting OCR errors resulting from quality issues or other problems during the character recognition. In addition to the creation of the corpus itself, all resulting news articles were scanned for temporal expressions, and all temporal expressions in the news articles were annotated and normalized. This newly created corpus then served as the basis for further analysis regarding the three research questions above. In summary, the tone of newspaper reporting included more warning and alarmist tones as the influenza was perceived as more of a health danger. However, even at the peak of the epidemic, examples were located of explanatory and even reassuring tone, despite the increased number of cases and deaths. Expert recommendations published in medical journals were widely publicized in newspapers and thus circulated to a broader public audience. Medical journals and doctors criticized newspapers for spreading exaggerated reports and fostering anxiety among patients and the public. Doctors’ perceptions of the influenza epidemic were shaped by their training, work with patients, reading of medical literature, and public awareness. Newspapers and medical journals underestimated the extent of cases, and responded when the disease became more widespread than expected. The number of deaths did not significantly exceed expectations, except for short periods (one to three weeks) which attracted considerable attention in newspapers. As much as possible, the results of this research are also made publicly available. The journal articles published in Current Research in Digital History and Medical History are open access to all. The papers available from Circulating Now at the US National Library of Medicine and the Medical Heritage Library are open access and available to anyone. Finally, most of the presentations for this project are posted online and can be accessed by anyone. These steps ensure that research outcomes, as well as the process described in articles, papers, and publications, can be readily accessed by scholars and the public.
Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)
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Dr. Shrady Says: The 1890 Russian Influenza as a Case Study for Understanding Epidemics in History. Medical Heritage Library Research Blog. August 29, 2016 (part 1)
E. Thomas Ewing, Sinclair Ewing-Nelson, and Veronica Kimmerly
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Dr. Shrady Says: The National Impact of Shrady’s Intervention. Medical Heritage Library Research Blog. September 26, 2016 (part 3)
E. Thomas Ewing, Sinclair Ewing-Nelson, and Veronica Kimmerly
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Dr. Shrady Says: “The Epidemic of Influenza” as an Editorial Intervention. Medical Heritage Library Research Blog. September 12, 2016 (part 2)
E. Thomas Ewing, Sinclair Ewing-Nelson, and Veronica Kimmerly
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A Framework For Historical Russian Flu Epidemic Exploration From German Newspapers. Digital Humanities 2017
Tran Van Canh, Katja Markert, Wolfgang Nejdl
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RussianFlu-DE: A German Corpus for a Historical Epidemic with Temporal Annotation. 21st International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries 2017: 61-73 [Best Paper Award]
Tran Van Canh, Katja Markert, Wolfgang Nejdl
