Victorian Anti-Vaccination Discourse Corpus, 1854-1906

Semino, Elena (2024). Victorian Anti-Vaccination Discourse Corpus, 1854-1906. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-856736

The Quo VaDis project applies the latest techniques for large-scale computer-aided linguistic analysis to discussions about vaccinations in public discourse, and specifically in: social media discussions in English, UK Parliamentary debates and UK national press reports. The goal is to arrive at a better understanding of pro- and anti-vaccination views, as well as undecided views, which will inform future public health campaigns.

The project will be based in the world-renowned ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) at Lancaster University, which was awarded a Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education in 2015. An interdisciplinary project team will work in interaction with three main project partners: Public Health England, the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport.

The World Health Organization's (WHO) list of top ten global health threats includes 'vaccine hesitancy' - 'a delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite availability of vaccination services'. Vaccination programmes are currently estimated to prevent between 2 and 3 million deaths a year worldwide. However, uptake of vaccinations in 90% of countries has been reported to be affected by vaccine hesitancy. In England, coverage for all routine childhood vaccinations is in decline, resulting in the resurgence of communicable diseases that had previously been eradicated. In August 2019, the UK lost its WHO measles elimination status.

The reasons for vaccine hesitancy are complex, but they need to be understood in order to be addressed effectively. This project focuses on discourse because the ways in which controversial topics such as vaccinations are talked about both reflect and shape beliefs and attitudes, which may in turn influence behaviour. More specifically, vaccinations have been the topic of UK parliamentary debates since before the first Vaccination Act of 1840; they have been increasingly discussed in the UK press since the early 1990s; and anti-vaccination views in particular have been described as part of a complex network of 'anti-public discourses' which, in recent years, are known to be both spread and contested on social media.

This project will involve the analysis of three multi-million-word datasets: (1) English-language contributions to three social media platforms: Mumsnet, Reddit and Twitter since the inception of each platform - respectively, 2000, 2005 and 2006; (2) UK national newspapers since 1990; and (3) UK parliamentary debates since 1830. These datasets will be analysed in a data-driven fashion by means of the computer-aided methods associated with Corpus Linguistics - a branch of Linguistics that involves the construction of large digital collections of naturally-occurring texts (known as 'corpora') and their analysis through tailor-made software. A corpus linguistic approach makes it possible to combine in a principled way the quantitative analysis of corpora containing millions of words with the qualitative analysis of individual texts, patterns and interactions. In this way, we will identify and investigate the different ways in which views about vaccinations are expressed in our data, for example, through patterns in choices of vocabulary, pronouns, negation, evaluation, metaphors, narratives, sources of evidence, and argumentation. We will reveal both differences and similarities in pro- and anti-vaccination views over time and across different groups of people, particularly as they form and interact on social media.

Our findings will make a major contribution to an understanding of views about vaccinations both in the UK (via our parliamentary and news datasets) and internationally (via our social media datasets). Through the involvement of our Project Partners, as well as more general engagement activities, these findings will be used as evidence for the design of future public health campaigns about vaccinations.

Data description (abstract)

The 3.5-million-word Victorian Anti-Vaccination Discourse Corpus (hereon VicVaDis) 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 which effectively ended the mandatory nature of vaccination.

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