Tracking the Russian Flu in U.S. and German Medical and Popular Reports, 1889-1893

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Wolfgang Nejdl
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2015 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 274148150

This project 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. A world-wide epidemic can be studied at every level from the microbial through the individual, communal, regional, national, and global. Digital humanities are especially suited for this kind of scalable analysis, as the close reading techniques familiar to humanities scholars are integrated with the large-scale interpretive methods of computer scientists and information scholars. The project will use historical materials to develop, apply, and evaluate new methods for computational epidemiology through applications such as word and term distribution analysis, fact extraction, sentiment analysis, network analysis and data visualization. This project develops innovative methods by exploring 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, and scope and shaping of public opinions? 3. How accurate were statements about the scope, impact, and significance of the Russian flu at distinct stages, by comparison to epidemiological data reported during and after the outbreak?The data sources include both popular newspapers and medical journals from the United States, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Russia, in both English and German languages. Digitized newspapers allow for tracking of the disease as it spreads, as well as provide evidence of the ways that expert medical knowledge was disseminated to public audiences. Digitized medical journals make it possible for computational methods to be applied to detailed reports about disease symptoms and transmission patterns as well as follow the social networks in the medical community. This project is thus unique among digital humanities projects by bringing together two distinctive approaches: first, the integration of popular newspaper reporting and expert medical analysis of the same disease outbreak, and second, developing analytical tools for source materials in two languages (English and German) to illustrate the nature of the transnational medical dialogue that also engaged with popular reporting on a global scale.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• International Connection: USA
• Partner Organisation: National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Tom Ewing