Starting in March 2015, the Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia (HML) embarked on its second large scale digitization project. Under grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Arcadia Foundation, and in conjunction with our partners at the Medical Heritage Library (MHL), a digital curation collaborative, we are working to digitize the entirety of State Medical Society Journals published in the US throughout the 20th Century.
The culmination of the project will be over 2.5 million pages of fully searchable digitized content. Patrons will be able to access this material through the MHL, as well as the Internet Archive, whose facilities in Princeton will be doing the digitization. This will be the first time that all of this content will be available in one place, either in print or digitally.
State Medical Society Journals
The first State Medical Society was founded in 1781 in Massachusetts. Since then, all fifty states have founded similar societies which have served not only as professional associations, but also as advocacy groups for patients and physicians, legislative lobbying organizations, accreditation bodies, educational institutions and publishing houses for regional medical journals.
While intended at publication to provide society members with up to date information about their profession, the journals now serve as documents of the trends and transformations in 20th Century American medicine, both locally and nationally. In addition to the scientific articles you might expect, these volumes are comprised of a wealth of enlightening incidental material such as transcriptions of medical talks, meeting minutes, local news, opinion pieces, literary reviews, medical history articles, and some surprisingly telling advertisements.
Digital Scholarship
As the nature of work and communication becomes more dispersed, so does the nature of scholarship. Researchers are now able to access primary and secondary source material in digital formats from anywhere in the world, and many institutions provide the infrastructure for scholars to communicate and create collaborative discourse surrounding these digital objects.
Perhaps more interestingly though, are the ways in which digitization initiatives, such as the State Society Medical Journal project, are changing the broader nature of academic production. In a white paper issued by the Council on Library and Information Resources, Working Together or Apart: Promoting the Next Generation of Digital Scholarship, Caroline Levander discusses the ways in which American Studies are changing in our global era:
Remarkable new possibilities for Americanist study are opened up when “America” is understood not as a synonym for an isolated nation but as a network of cultural influences that have extended across the hemisphere from the period of colonization to the present. Clearly, future research and curricula on all regions of the Americas will increasingly emphasize comparative and cross-regional studies . . . Innovative digital environments, resources, services, and infrastructure are essential to the success of this new research field.
Through digitization efforts such as the one currently being undertaken, we are ensuring that these essential resources in the study of American medicine can be more broadly utilized and contextualized. Additionally, the transformation of physical objects into digital objects provides new ways of working with these materials, known broadly as the Digital Humanities (DH).
Digital Humanities
What are the Digital Humanities? This might be the first question some readers have, and it’s a very good one. Digital Humanists themselves struggle with a precise definition for this burgeoning field. For example, if one looks to the site http://whatisdigitalhumanities.com/ for an answer, one gets a different answer each time the site is refreshed. But a simple explanation is that it is the intersection of computing and the humanities. Much of the research is focused on using “big data” analysis techniques in the context of humanities based corpora, or in the innovative, often multi-media, presentation of materials and research.
The vast quantity of information in the State Society Medical Journal collection lends itself well to thinking about ways in which the collection can be viewed through the context of the DH. A good example of this already exist on the MHL website as an instance of the Bookworm Data-Mining tool. Similar to the Google Ngram Viewer, which employs the Google Books corpus, the Bookworm tool lets people look at the frequency with which terms are used chronologically throughout a collection of digitized texts. This can tell us a lot about when words come in and out of fashion. You may be surprised to learn that words such as “monster” were still accepted medical terms as late at the 1920’s.
However, there is great potential in using more complex methods to analyze this data. For example, what about the opinion that surrounds the use of a term? One technique called “sentiment analysis” or “opinion mining,” looks at the positivity, negativity and objectivity values of the surrounding terms, determined through existing databases of word ratings, such as SentiWordNet. This could be used to look at how the opinion surrounding a term changes throughout a particular time period. Additionally, since each of the State Medical Society Journals is intrinsically geographic, location could also be used as a variable for comparison. The results of this data could then be displayed online using an interactive map, such as the 19th-Century Caribbean Cholera Timeline from Duke University’s Haiti Project, or Pox Americana, an interactive geographic timeline of the 18th Century small pox epidemic.
As information technologies continue to advance, so too will digital scholarship. Though we may not be able to predict the types of techniques that scholars will be using 50 years from now, the creation of complete digital collections, such as the 20th Century State Medical Society Journals, is essential for laying the ground work that will make this scholarship possible.