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

本项目考察了美国和德国在俄罗斯流感流行期间的医学讨论和流行报告，从1889年底爆发到持续到1893年的连续浪潮。世界范围的流行病可以从微生物到个人、社区、区域、国家和全球的各个层面进行研究。数字人文学科特别适合这种可扩展的分析，因为人文学者熟悉的细读技术与计算机科学家和信息学者的大规模解释方法相结合。该项目将使用历史材料，通过单词和术语分布分析、事实提取、情感分析、网络分析和数据可视化等应用，开发、应用和评估计算流行病学的新方法。该项目通过探索将人文学科研究的核心主题与数字化文本的可用性和计算分析的进步所带来的机遇和挑战联系起来的研究问题，开发了创新的方法。疾病暴发期间的报告基调如何随着报告地点、病例数量、受害者类别和累积死亡人数等变量的变化而变化？2. 报纸和医学期刊是如何对俄罗斯流感的叙述做出贡献的，包括对爆发的认识、医学专家的参与、对名人受害者的关注、公众舆论的范围和塑造？3. 与爆发期间和之后报告的流行病学数据相比，关于俄罗斯流感在不同阶段的范围、影响和重要性的陈述有多准确？数据来源包括来自美国、德国、奥地利、瑞士和俄罗斯的流行报纸和医学期刊，英文和德文均有。数字化报纸允许在疾病传播时对其进行跟踪，并提供向公众传播专业医学知识的方式的证据。数字化医学期刊使计算方法能够应用于疾病症状和传播模式的详细报告，并跟踪医学界的社会网络。因此，这个项目在数字人文项目中是独一无二的，它汇集了两种不同的方法：第一，将流行的报纸报道和对同一疾病爆发的专家医学分析结合起来；第二，为两种语言（英语和德语）的原始材料开发分析工具，以说明跨国医学对话的性质，这种对话也涉及全球范围内的流行报道。

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.