Everybody had it in Imagination if not in Reality: Information Flows during a Global Influenza Epidemic, 1889-1890

E Thomas Ewing (1)

1 Virginia Tech [Blacksburg]

The Russian Influenza, which reached the United States in late 1889, caused widespread disease as well as widespread reporting on the disease in newspapers and among medical professionals. A case study of one newspaper and one physician in a small town in Connecticut illustrates the value of deploying text mining, digital humanities, and close reading tools and techniques to understand the information ecosystem in which epidemic influenza affected individual lives and transformed medical reporting.

Mots clés: Influenza; epidemic; information; history of medicine; digital humanities; text mining

Domaines: Histoire, Philosophie et Sociologie des sciences; Maladies infectieuses; Milieux et Changements globaux

E Thomas Ewing. Everybody had it in Imagination if not in Reality: Information Flows during a Global Influenza Epidemic, 1889-1890. 2020. ⟨hal-02484025⟩