Project: An Epidemiology of Information (flu1918.lib.vt.edu) used digital and traditional humanities tools to analyze the 1918 influenza pandemic. The project heavily relied on data mining techniques to process and extract meaningful information from a large corpus of historical newspaper articles. These techniques enabled the researchers to identify patterns, trends, and key themes in the pandemic’s reporting. Complementing this computational approach, the project also utilized historical and rhetorical analysis, a traditional humanities methodology, to provide context and nuanced interpretation of the findings.
- Data Mining techniques are used to process the newspaper data.
- Use rhetorical and historical analysis (along with the data sources) to obtain information.
- Data Mining and Historical and rhetorical analysis are used to process information.
- The Data is contextualized and interpreted through the use of historical and rhetorical analysis.
- The project website has been developed and hosted using WordPress
While historical analysis allowed scholars to see the articles within their individual historical context, data mining helped extract information from newspaper articles. The project’s website and communication of its data were made using WordPress. The Virginia Tech University Libraries Digital Scholarship is a great resource for Digital Humanities.
While the project used these technologies, flexibility and reproducibility could be enhanced by providing thorough documentation of the specific methods and settings applied during the data mining.