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Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - The Victorian Anti-Vaccination Discourse Corpus (VicVaDis)
T2 - construction and exploration
AU - Hardaker, Claire
AU - Deignan, Alice
AU - Semino, Elena
AU - Coltman-Patel, Tara
AU - Dance, William
AU - Demjen, Zsofia
AU - Sanderson, Chris
AU - Gatherer, Derek
PY - 2024/4/1
Y1 - 2024/4/1
N2 - This article introduces and explores the 3.5-million-word Victorian Anti-Vaccination Discourse Corpus (VicVaDis). The corpus is intended to provide a (freely accessible) historical resource for the investigation of the earliest public concerns and arguments against vaccination in England, which revolved around compulsory vaccination against smallpox in the second half of the 19th century. It consists of 133 anti-vaccination pamphlets and publications gathered from 1854 to 1906, a span of 53 years that loosely coincides with the Victorian era (1837–1901). This timeframe was chosen to capture the period between the 1853 Vaccination Act, which made smallpox vaccination for babies compulsory, and the 1907 Act that effectively ended the mandatory nature of vaccination. After an overview of the historical background, this article describes the rationale, design and construction of the corpus, and then demonstrates how it can be exploited to investigate the main arguments against compulsory vaccination by means of widely accessible corpus linguistic tools. Where appropriate, parallels are drawn between Victorian and 21st-century vaccine-hesitant attitudes and arguments. Overall, this article demonstrates the potential of corpus analysis to add to our understanding of historical concerns about vaccination.
AB - This article introduces and explores the 3.5-million-word Victorian Anti-Vaccination Discourse Corpus (VicVaDis). The corpus is intended to provide a (freely accessible) historical resource for the investigation of the earliest public concerns and arguments against vaccination in England, which revolved around compulsory vaccination against smallpox in the second half of the 19th century. It consists of 133 anti-vaccination pamphlets and publications gathered from 1854 to 1906, a span of 53 years that loosely coincides with the Victorian era (1837–1901). This timeframe was chosen to capture the period between the 1853 Vaccination Act, which made smallpox vaccination for babies compulsory, and the 1907 Act that effectively ended the mandatory nature of vaccination. After an overview of the historical background, this article describes the rationale, design and construction of the corpus, and then demonstrates how it can be exploited to investigate the main arguments against compulsory vaccination by means of widely accessible corpus linguistic tools. Where appropriate, parallels are drawn between Victorian and 21st-century vaccine-hesitant attitudes and arguments. Overall, this article demonstrates the potential of corpus analysis to add to our understanding of historical concerns about vaccination.
U2 - 10.1093/llc/fqad075
DO - 10.1093/llc/fqad075
M3 - Journal article
VL - 39
SP - 162
EP - 174
JO - Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
JF - Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
SN - 2055-7671
IS - 1
ER -