Contagion and Curatr
Thursday, 18 April 2019, 1 – 2pm 
A paper by Prof Gerardine Meaney (UCD) with live streaming to clinical sites as part of the Medical and Health Humanities Initiative Lecture Series.
How do you set about finding specific references and thematic associations in the massive digital resource represented by the British Library Nineteenth Century Book Corpus, originally digitised through a collaboration with Microsoft?
The 'Contagion, Biopolitics and Cultural Memory' project at UCD Dublin set out to illuminate culturally and historically specific understandings of disease and contagion that appear within the fiction in the corpus. In order to do so, the project team extracted over 35,000 unique volumes out of a total of 65,000 in English and built a searchable interface of 12.3 million individual pages of text, which can be filtered and sorted using the corpus metadata (e.g. author, title, year, etc). So for the first time it is possible to reliably identify and extract fiction, drama, history, topography, etc, from the corpus.
Contagion and Curatr: Researching Cultural Attitudes to Disease and Health in the British Library Nineteenth Century Corpus
Campus Location: Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute
Accessibility: Yes
Room: Neill Lecture Theatre
Event Category: Lectures and Seminars, Public
Type of Event: One-time event
Audience: Undergrad, Postgrad, Alumni, Faculty & Staff, Public
Cost: Free
