Goal of Project
This project seeks to understand how newspapers shaped public opinion during the 1918 influenza pandemic.
Scholars continue to analyze the disease’s pathogenesis and the social, historical, and policy-related implications of the pandemic.
However, they were proven unsuccessful. What was found is that digitized historical sources such as the newspapers in the Chronicling America collection present significant limitations to computationally based research and data mining cannot substitute for close or “manual” readings of discrete texts.
“When we wrote the grant proposal for “An Epidemiology of Information” three years ago, we
thought that data mining would allow us to analyze all Chronicling America’s newspapers for
1918 and 1919. Even given the tempered assessments of the capacity of computational analytics
to transform the humanities with quantitative data [4 and 5], we were confident in our capacity to
develop methods that utilize digitized newspapers and provide a fuller accounting of the impact
of the influenza pandemic than previous smaller-scaled studies.”
Photograph from The Bismarck Tribune, 10/15/1918, page 2