Project Details
Description
The aim of this project is to explore the use of data visualisation to improve interrogation and understanding of complex text-based historical data. This proposed project sits within a larger programme of developmental interdisciplinary research which brings together primary health care and historical studies to investigate the early years of antibiotic use in primary care. The use of these drugs in practice has received little attention from scholars, and the historical context has the potential to inform contemporary debate around issues of antibiotic overuse and antimicrobial resistance and may generalise to wider aspects of medical therapies.
The digitisation of historical written records, such as those within older scientific journal publications, provides historians with a relatively easy to access, large and potentially extremely valuable resource for undertaking research, not easily achieved through conventional searching of paper documents. Reassembling the fragmented information contained within various types of articles and scattered throughout numerous editions has the potential to generate new knowledge and understanding and reveal information which would otherwise have remained hidden (ter Braake et al. 2016). The archive of the British Journal of General Practice (BJGP) has been selected as a case study for this project because it is readily accessible, has text we have confirmed is searchable and is of direct relevance to the research topic. The BJGP was established in 1953 as a research newsletter for GPs (Jones 2013) and is a rich primary source for studying historical healthcare practitioners’ views and interests. All editions of the journal have been digitised and made available as an online, searchable archive (bjgp.org).
Data will be extracted from the archive using standard text search methods, identifying common terms (e.g., antibiotic type, brand name, symptoms, diagnoses, safety concerns), relationships between terms (e.g., specific drugs with side effects), and relevant metadata (e.g., the article type, author background, date). For this study, searching and cataloguing of text will involve manual input, with a view to automation of these processes in later work.
The digitisation of historical written records, such as those within older scientific journal publications, provides historians with a relatively easy to access, large and potentially extremely valuable resource for undertaking research, not easily achieved through conventional searching of paper documents. Reassembling the fragmented information contained within various types of articles and scattered throughout numerous editions has the potential to generate new knowledge and understanding and reveal information which would otherwise have remained hidden (ter Braake et al. 2016). The archive of the British Journal of General Practice (BJGP) has been selected as a case study for this project because it is readily accessible, has text we have confirmed is searchable and is of direct relevance to the research topic. The BJGP was established in 1953 as a research newsletter for GPs (Jones 2013) and is a rich primary source for studying historical healthcare practitioners’ views and interests. All editions of the journal have been digitised and made available as an online, searchable archive (bjgp.org).
Data will be extracted from the archive using standard text search methods, identifying common terms (e.g., antibiotic type, brand name, symptoms, diagnoses, safety concerns), relationships between terms (e.g., specific drugs with side effects), and relevant metadata (e.g., the article type, author background, date). For this study, searching and cataloguing of text will involve manual input, with a view to automation of these processes in later work.
| Alternative title | Visualising antibiotics in the BJGP 1953-1969 |
|---|---|
| Status | Finished |
| Effective start/end date | 1/01/22 → 4/07/22 |
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