A one-year project to develop teaching materials on infectious diseases from the perspectives of the humanities and the health sciences.

Human Dimensions of Infectious Diseases initiates and sustains a faculty collaboration exploring the relationship between humans and diseases with the goal of producing new approaches to undergraduate instruction connecting the humanities and health sciences. The project team representing five departments (Biological Sciences, English, History, Population Health Sciences, and Science, Technology and Society) will participate in an intensive summer workshop and then meet regularly during the academic year. These activities will provide opportunities to discuss thematic issues, explore new pedagogical approaches, and advance interdisciplinary instruction at a public land grant research university. This collaboration will result in the creation of three new courses, on human dimensions of infectious diseases, history of infectious diseases, and health disparities and infectious diseases, cross-listed by multiple departments and offered on a regular basis.

A three-week seminar for sixteen school teachers on the history and impact of the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic, held in Blacksburg, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.

Flu! The 1918 Spanish Influenza in US and World History will provide teachers with an opportunity to read and discuss the most recent scholarship by historians, epidemiologists, demographers, and public health scholars. In addition, participants will pursue their own research topics, using online newspaper databases, archived oral histories, and documentation from public health authorities. Seminar participants will acquire a broader understanding of the role of disease and health in American and world history, an awareness of how historical precedents inform current plans for dealing with global pandemics, and an appreciation of a complicated topic that engages scholarly as well as broad general interest.

An advanced workshop on incorporating digital humanities tools into medical history research. Preceded by a series of virtual meetings and activities, the two-day workshop will be held at the National Institutes of Health and will result in an open access publication of scholarly essays.

Viral Networks: An Advanced Workshop in Medical History and Digital Humanities will bring together scholars from the field of medical history whose research shows particular promise for making innovative use of methods, tools, and data from the digital humanities. Viral Networks will combine a face-to-face workshop in February 2018 at the National Institutes of Health with structured virtual editing activities that produce innovative scholarship. Workshop participants include twelve Contributing Scholars, each producing a chapter of original research; Consulting Scholars who are experts in network analysis; and an Advisory Board who will coordinate stages of collaborative writing, peer review, collective editing, and final publication in an open access and freely available scholarly platform. The requested funds will support travel costs for workshop participants; salaries for a Graduate Research Assistant and the Project Director; workshop costs; and honoraria for Consulting Scholars.

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, working in cooperation with the Office of Digital Humanities at the NEH and the National Library of Medicine at the NIH, propose a symposium, workshop, and edited volume on the intersections of data, health, and the digital humanities.

Shared Horizons II will enhance the humanities by building further bridges into medicine and data based on ever expanding research located at the intersection of data, health, and the digital humanities, which asks how records of human experience in the history of medicine include numerical representations requiring rigorous examination by scholars and students trained in both humanities inquiry and data analytics. Through the involvement of participants drawn from a variety of areas in biomedicine and the humanities, Shared Horizons II will focus on themes and topics intersecting the digital humanities and health data, including transnational studies, data and health before the modern period, health and data experts from underrepresented populations, experiences of marginalized communities. The workshop will result in the publication of an edited volume of original research contributions.

Using the digitized newspaper archives in the NEH-funded Chronicling America and Peel's Prairie Provinces, the project explores how the spread of information found in local newspapers about the 1918 influenza pandemic influenced policy makers and the general public. The project is led by scholars from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (US) and the University of Toronto (Canada) along with additional advisors from the University of Texas, McMaster University, Simon Fraser University, and the University of Alberta. The Canadian partner, the University of Toronto, is requesting $125,000 from SSHRC.

An Epidemiology of Information: Data Mining the 1918 Influenza Pandemic seeks to harness the power of data mining techniques with the interpretive analytics of the humanities and social sciences to understand how newspapers shaped public opinion and represented authoritative knowledge during this deadly pandemic. This project makes use of the more than 100 newspaper titles for 1918 available from Chronicling America at the United States Library of Congress and the Peel’s Prairie Provinces collection at the University of Alberta Library. The application of algorithmic techniques enables the domain expert to systematically explore a broad repository of data and identify qualitative features of the pandemic in the small scale as well as the genealogy of information flow in the large scale. This research can provide methods for understanding the spread of information and the flow of disease in other societies facing the threat of pandemics.