Geographical text analysis : a new approach to understanding nineteenth-century mortality

Porter, Catherine and Atkinson, Paul and Gregory, Ian Norman (2015) Geographical text analysis : a new approach to understanding nineteenth-century mortality. Health and Place, 36. pp. 25-34. ISSN 1353-8292

Preview

PDF (Health_Place_AAM)
Health_Place_AAM.pdf - Accepted Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs.
Download (1MB)

Abstract

This paper uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Corpus Linguistics to extract disease related keywords from the Registrar-General’s Decennial Supplements. Combined with known mortality figures, this provides, for the first time, a spatial picture of the relationship between the Registrar-General’s discussion of disease and deaths in England and Wales in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Techniques such as collocation, density analysis, the Hierarchical Regional Settlement matrix and regression analysis are employed to extract and analyse the data resulting in new insight into the relationship between the Registrar-General’s published texts and the changing mortality patterns during this time.