3.2.1 Selecting Texts: Representativeness and Balance

When designing a corpus, one of our first considerations is what kinds of texts and language use we want it to represent. This decision, like all considerations underpinning corpus design, will be driven first and foremost by our research questions and/or the broader purpose of our corpus. However, in most cases, we as researchers and corpus builders do not have access to – or even complete knowledge of – the full extent of the texts that could be deemed relevant for our research purposes, even if these purposes are very clearly defined.Footnote ¹ For this reason, most corpora constitute a mere sample of all the possible texts ‘out there’ that could have been included. We will therefore typically have to decide how we are going to sample texts from all the possible language use ‘out there’ in the world that could suit our purposes and help us answer our research questions. Designing a corpus essentially involves developing a sampling frame to help us decide which texts will be included in the corpus and whether we will include these texts in their entirety or sample material from them (Biber, Reference Biber, Sampson and McCarthy2004: 174).

At this point, considerations around representativeness become relevant. Biber (Reference Biber1993: 244) defines representativeness as ‘the extent to which a sample includes the full range of variability in a population’. Here the term ‘population’ refers not necessarily to a group of people but more conceptually to the ‘notional space within which language is being sampled’ (McEnery and Hardie, Reference Hardie2012: 8). Broadly speaking, the more representative of the target population our sample (or corpus) is, the greater confidence we can have that our findings can be generalised to the population under study.

In assembling a corpus of news reporting about obesity, Brookes and Baker (Reference Brookes and Baker2021) had to decide what they wanted their data to represent and then design their corpus accordingly. They wanted to assemble British articles that covered the topic of obesity, so they searched for articles using the LexisNexis online news archive, which stores digitised versions of online and print editions of newspaper articles from a range of countries, including the UK. Brookes and Baker (Reference Brookes and Baker2021) searched for all articles containing one or more mentions of the word obese and/or obesity. This is a relatively liberal search criterion, compared to corpus studies of news texts more broadly (which often stipulate that search terms need to occur multiple times and/or within the headline or lead paragraph; e.g., Brookes, Reference Brookes2023). Brookes and Baker’s more liberal search criteria had the advantage that it yielded a larger number of results. A potential disadvantage of this approach is that it yields a considerable number of articles that are not ‘about’ obesity but which, rather, mention it in passing. (For a discussion of ‘aboutness’, see Scott and Tribble (Reference Scott and Tribble2006); for ways of measuring aboutness in the process of corpus design, see Scott (Reference Scott2017).) Yet, viewed another way, their decision to include such cases brought the analytical advantage that it allowed the researchers to consider instances in which obesity was, in being mentioned in passing, accordingly ‘topicalised’ within the context of reporting around other news topics and events. It could also be argued that every mention of a topic, even briefly, will contribute towards the incremental effect of discourse around that topic.

As noted, Brookes and Baker (Reference Brookes and Baker2021) decided to focus on contemporary UK coverage on obesity, and they defined ‘contemporary’ as the last 10 years prior to the start of their research. For this reason, they searched for articles published between 2008 and 2017 (inclusive). Had they wanted to adopt a more historical focus, they would have had to sample texts from further into the past. This would also have influenced how they went about sourcing texts for the corpus; while LexisNexis provides reliable coverage of recent years, this coverage becomes patchier as we go further back in time – meaning that this repository is not ideally suited for researching historical news texts.

Even once the researchers had decided that they wanted to focus on UK coverage, and within that to adopt a contemporary focus, the British press still holds a lot of variation that the authors needed to consider when building the corpus. Newspapers in the UK can be distinguished according to their coverage (i.e., national, regional), their format or ‘style’ (i.e., broadsheet, tabloid), their political stance (i.e., left-leaning, right-leaning or centrist) and their frequency of appearance (i.e., daily, weekly).

Brookes and Baker (Reference Brookes and Baker2021) decided to focus on national as opposed to regional coverage (due to time limits on how much they could analyse). They included both broadsheets and tabloids, and newspapers across the political spectrum. In terms of frequency, they focused on daily newspapers but included as part of this each newspaper’s Sunday, online and so-called sister editions. For example, when collecting texts from the Daily Mail, they included texts from the Mail Online and Mail on Sunday. This marked an important way in which Brookes and Baker sought to expand on previous research on the topic, which had focussed, in the main (and in the context of the UK, exclusively), on printed newspapers only. Table 3.1 gives a breakdown of the article and word counts for each newspaper in the corpus, as well as the mean article length for each newspaper.

Table 3.1Number of articles, words, and mean article lengths in Brookes and Baker’s () corpus

Newspaper	Articles	Words	Mean article length (in words)
Express	5,193	3,265,741	629
Guardian	5,008	5,238,062	1,046
Independent	4,336	3,303,269	762
Mail	12,805	11,890,340	929
Mirror	3,398	2,202,323	648
Morning Star	152	63,641	419
Star	1,072	370,818	346
Sun	2,286	1,082,808	474
Telegraph	5,680	4,804,351	846
Times	3,948	3,831,868	971
Total	43,878	36,053,221	822

As this table shows, Brookes and Baker’s corpus was not equally balanced in terms of the number of articles and words contributed by each newspaper. One newspaper, the Mail, contributed around 30 per cent of the words in the corpus, while the contribution of the Morning Star is marginal. Average article length also varied considerably, with the Guardian’s average being more than double that of tabloids such as the Star and Sun. Such imbalances are important to acknowledge, and researchers can make adaptations to their sampling frame to regularise the contributions coming from different sources. (See Baker (Reference Baker2009) for a discussion of the design of the Brown family of reference corpora.) Rather than take, for example, 500-word samples from articles, Brookes and Baker (Reference Brookes and Baker2021) decided to include all texts in their entirety, on the basis that the functions of the representational discourses they identified could be generated across the full length of the text(s) in question. With respect to the imbalance in the number of articles from each newspaper, they argued that this represented the real-life press landscape and, more specifically, the corresponding imbalance in terms of how much obesity coverage is provided by each of the newspapers they sampled. This imbalance did not pose much of an issue for their analysis, since Brookes and Baker (Reference Brookes and Baker2021) compared different newspapers and sections of the press using relative rather than raw frequency information. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that in such cases, what can be determined from the corpus is based on the language used in some newspapers that are represented more than others. Accordingly, they modulated any claims based on their analysis of the whole corpus with this imbalance in mind.

Once the relevant texts have been identified, researchers can structure their corpus in such a way as to facilitate queries and comparisons at various levels. Brookes and Baker (Reference Brookes and Baker2021) downloaded and stored the articles in their corpus in a way that would allow them to discriminate at the level of the text. This allowed them to carry out comparisons of the articles according to their format (i.e., broadsheets versus tabloids), political leaning (i.e., left-leaning versus right-leaning), and date of publication (i.e., looking at change over time). In addition to having analytical utility, this method of storing data also allowed Brookes and Baker to assess the balance and representativeness of their corpus (and, in turn, to modulate their analytical claims), in a way that would not have been possible (or at least practical) had they stored their corpus data in a less-organised way (e.g., as a single file with all articles stored together, indistinguishable in terms of newspaper, date of publication, and so on).

3.2.2 Preparing Texts for Corpus Analysis

Along with attending to theoretical considerations, Brookes and Baker (Reference Brookes and Baker2021) also had to take into account some practical considerations when designing and building their corpus. In this case, the news texts they downloaded from LexisNexis required processing prior to analysis; otherwise they would contain features which can adversely influence the accuracy of analytical procedures.

One such issue, and one that frequently arises in the compilation of corpora of online resources, relates to the presence of so-called boilerplate text. This refers to language that occurs within a text, but which is likely to constitute ‘noise’ in the context of an analysis. When downloading news articles from LexisNexis, the text files will include labels which indicate, inter alia, the ‘headline’, ‘byline’ and the author’s name. As such elements occur in every text in the corpus, these can accumulate quickly and thus become problematic for frequency-based analytical measures. In this case, the researchers could rely on the technical support of Andrew Hardie, also working within the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS), who repurposed these elements as metadata for storing and searching the corpus on the online corpus query processor CQPweb (Hardie, Reference Hardie2012), while rendering such information in a way that would not interfere with corpus querying procedures. Alternatively, they could have used something like the ‘boilerplate removal’ function of WordSmith Tools (Scott, Reference Scott2016), which is also much faster than manually removing boilerplate text by hand. Of course, deciding on what counts as ‘boilerplate’ material is a subjective judgement which has to be made by the researcher and will depend on the aims of the research.

Another practical issue that Brookes and Baker (Reference Brookes and Baker2021) had to deal with, and one which can be particularly troublesome during the collection of news texts from archives, was the presence of duplicate material. The LexisNexis database can store multiple versions of a single news text (e.g., the online and print versions of an article). This issue was exacerbated further in the case of online articles which reported on developing news stories. This is because such articles constitute ‘live’ news texts which are typically updated throughout the day as the story develops or corrections to the original story are made. With each update, a ‘new’ article is essentially produced, and the original article and all subsequent updates were stored as separate texts in LexisNexis. Like boilerplate text, duplicated material can skew the results of frequency-based analytical techniques while also hindering the representativeness of the corpus in a more general sense.

There are a series of steps through which duplicate texts in a corpus can be identified; first, Brookes and Baker (Reference Brookes and Baker2021) noticed a large number of duplicated articles by manually reviewing chronologically ordered concordance lines. This prompted the second stage, which was to search for long n-grams (e.g., of seven or more words) automatically, using the corpus analysis tool. N-grams of this length typically occur due to the presence of either quoted material or duplicated articles. Third, the authors searched more systematically for such duplicated material using the ‘duplicate text’ function within version 7 of WordSmith Tools (Scott, Reference Scott2016). This function allows users to group the texts within a corpus according to a user-determined threshold of linguistic similarity and then manually check and, if they wish, remove high-similarity results. On the whole, this approach was effective for Brookes and Baker (Reference Brookes and Baker2021); however, there is no entirely reliable automated way of identifying and removing duplicate texts, and manual checking at each stage is advised. Moreover, like the identification of boilerplate material, deciding on what counts as a duplicate text is up to the corpus compiler and will depend on the aims of the research. For example, to allow for the presence of the repeated use of press copy by the different news providers represented in their corpus (PA Media, Thomson Reuters, United Press International), Brookes and Baker (Reference Brookes and Baker2021) only searched for and removed duplicated texts within newspapers (including online, Sunday and ‘sister’ editions), rather than looking across newspapers.

This example, from Brookes and Baker, provides some key considerations for building a new corpus of texts that have not been necessarily created for linguistic research. In the next section, we discuss how researchers might adapt texts that have been collected for research purposes, though not originally conceptualised as corpus data.

3.3.1 Communication in Emergency Departments

The data analysed in this case comes from Emergency Department (ED) interactions in Australian hospitals and was collected by a team led by Professor Diana Slade from the Institute for Communication in Health Care (ICH), based at Australia National University. The data was collected for the purposes of a study combining ‘discourse analysis of authentic interactions between clinicians and patients; and qualitative ethnographic analysis of the social, organisational, and interdisciplinary clinician practices of each department’ (Slade et al., Reference Slade, Manidis, McGregor, Scheeres, Chandler, Stein-Parbury, Dunston, Herke and Matthiessen2015: 11).

EDs are a high-stakes interactional health context in which effective communication can result in life-changing outcomes for patients. There is a clear contribution to be made by linguists in helping to ensure that such communication is effective and supports both the health practitioners in carrying out their care duties and the patients in clearly communicating their needs so that they can be met. Accessing authentic ED interactions is difficult, given the urgency of the encounters and the highly sensitive nature of the personal experiences being discussed. Slade and colleagues (Reference Slade, Manidis, McGregor, Scheeres, Chandler, Stein-Parbury, Dunston, Herke and Matthiessen2015: 1–2) summarise what they collected as

The dataset therefore represents ‘one of the most comprehensive studies internationally on patient-clinician communication in hospitals’ (Slade et al., Reference Slade, Manidis, McGregor, Scheeres, Chandler, Stein-Parbury, Dunston, Herke and Matthiessen2015: 2). The original research team produced invaluable analyses of the data from a discourse-analytic approach, which they reported in their book Communicating in Hospital Emergency Departments (Slade et al., Reference Slade, Manidis, McGregor, Scheeres, Chandler, Stein-Parbury, Dunston, Herke and Matthiessen2015). What the ICH team collected certainly constitutes an amount of data that is appropriate to benefit from the procedures of corpus analysis and so seemed fitting for secondary analysis using such tools.

3.3.2 Data Transfer

The process of sharing data can introduce challenges that affect what is available to researchers conducting secondary analysis. For instance, there may be ethical concerns if the original consent provided by participants did not account for extending access to the data to those beyond the original research team. Anonymisation may be required before the data is shared, which means that some details may be missing at subsequent stages of analysis.

The ICH team conducted observations and interviews with clinicians and patients, though researchers at CASS have only worked (so far) with the observations that were documented as ‘patient journeys’ – that is, the full range of interactions that patients experienced from the moment that they entered the ED until their departure or admission into hospital. This large-scale project generated numerous files (audio recordings, researcher notes, information sheets, transcripts, etc.), and the ICH team was able to share their documents with the CASS team in an anonymised form (which precluded the sharing of audio files). However, while the ICH team refers to 82 patient journeys, following the transfer of all associated documents and files, researchers at the CASS Centre were able to identify only 72 patient journey transcripts. This demonstrates one of the potential pitfalls of managing and transferring large datasets.

3.3.3 Data Conversion

The ICH team provided word-processed transcripts of the audio-recorded content captured through their observations of the ED encounters. The transcripts were accompanied by metadata about each participant (i.e., role, gender, age, language background, and nationality), and each transcript included a header with information about the context of the ‘patient journey’ (presenting illness, diagnosis, duration of visit, triage level, number of health professionals seen, and researcher notes), as shown in Figure 3.1.

Figure 3.1 The first page of a transcript document.

Figure 3.1Long description

The document provides emergency communication details for patient number P017, named Denae, at Hospital P. The data information includes the transcript number (1), recording date of 25 September 2007, and sound file number 070925P017 a & b P (two files). The “recorded by” field is redacted, and the “Move Analysis” field is blank.

The background information for the patient indicates a female of Anglo ethnicity, speaks English, and a redacted date of birth. The presenting concern is a fracture – left foot injury, the triage number is 4 and arrival time is 13:45. The patient was triaged at 14:30, seen the first time a doctor by 15:30, and left at 16:07, with a total time in the emergency department of 1 hour and 37 minutes.

The background information for health practitioners includes a triage nurse and a doctor, both female, with the nurse speaking English and the doctor speaking a language labelled as N E S B. There are blank fields for their ages and ethnicities. For the doctor, there is also other information, written as R M O or Registrar question mark.

The transcript section provides a key to participants, including P for patient, N for nurse, Z 1 for an unidentified female staff member, R 1 for researcher, D for doctor, and R 2 for researcher.

The sound file 070925P017 a P includes a conversation where the patient mentions pain lasting two weeks and the nurse inquires about the specific ankle being discussed. This is laid out in a table under the columns: Interactive Structure, Turns/Moves, Speaker, and Text.

The page also contains a header that reads “Emergency Communication – Hospital P” and a footer that reads “P 0 1 7 – Denae”.

The process of creating a corpus from this collection of documents involved reformatting the spoken content as plain text and the additional transcriber notes and other non-speech material as annotation using eXtensible Markup Language (XML), which can be computed by corpus analysis tools such as CQPweb (Hardie, Reference Hardie2012) to carry out tokenisation, lemmatisation, part-of-speech (POS) tagging, and semantic tagging.

While it is a common practice in studies of spoken communication to produce a written version, providing researchers with a tangible record that they can analyse and publish in conventional forms of dissemination (which are primarily typed), transcription is inherently a process of recontextualisation and involves decision-making regarding what is documented and how. Not all aspects will be of relevance to the research, resulting in a variety of transcription systems (Richardson et al., Reference Richardson, Hamann, Tompkinson, Haworth and Deamer2023: 5). Alongside spoken content, Sperberg-McQueen and Burnard (Reference Sperberg-McQueen and Burnard1994: 250) remind us that ‘the production and comprehension of speech are intimately bound up with the situation in which speech occurs’, prompting us to incorporate contextual features when we document speech. However, they also assert that ‘determining which are relevant is not always simple’ (Reference Sperberg-McQueen and Burnard1994: 250). Furthermore, if the researcher plans to investigate the frequency and distribution of such features using corpus tools, they need to be encoded in a format that lends itself to corpus query.

Slade and colleagues (Reference Slade, Manidis, McGregor, Scheeres, Chandler, Stein-Parbury, Dunston, Herke and Matthiessen2015: xi) produced orthographic transcripts, favouring standard English spelling but using non-standard forms to capture ‘idiosyncratic or dialectal pronunciations (e.g., gonna)’. They refer to fillers and hesitation markers, which were ‘transcribed as they are spoken, using the standard English variants (e.g., ah, uh huh, hmm and mmm)’ (Reference Slade, Manidis, McGregor, Scheeres, Chandler, Stein-Parbury, Dunston, Herke and Matthiessen2015: xi). Finally, they explain that punctuation marks were broadly used according to their meaning ‘in standard written English’, though also used to indicate additional special meaning, such as putting words in parentheses when the content was unclear and according to ‘the transcriber’s best analysis’ (Slade et al., Reference Slade, Manidis, McGregor, Scheeres, Chandler, Stein-Parbury, Dunston, Herke and Matthiessen2015: xi). Slade and colleagues’ (Reference Slade, Manidis, McGregor, Scheeres, Chandler, Stein-Parbury, Dunston, Herke and Matthiessen2015) notation system is consistent with wider transcription practices in the field (see Sperberg-McQueen and Burnard, Reference Sperberg-McQueen and Burnard1994; Fraser, Reference Fraser2022) and demonstrates the influence of the system outlined by Jefferson (Reference Jefferson and Lerner2004), which is widely used across the social sciences and strongly associated with conversation analysis. As such, the transcription system aligns with the analytical procedures that the ICH team was to carry out.

We can, however, begin to see potential issues in the transcript notation demonstrated in Jefferson (Reference Jefferson and Lerner2004) for corpus tools that rely on computing regular forms. For instance, the Jeffersonian system suggests using parenthesized ‘h’ to indicate plosiveness (i.e., s(h)orr(h)y). This vocal quality can result from high emotional states, such as crying or laughter, as well as difficulties producing speech because of physical discomfort – all of which would be likely and pertinent in a study of patients in hospital EDs. However, this variant form would not be included in a simple corpus query for ‘sorry’, which may be an unintended consequence. As an alternative that would also facilitate the automatic conversion to a ‘corpus-ready’ format, a transcriber could record this as ‘sorry [#heavy breathing]’.

Collins and Hardie (Reference Collins and Hardie2022) summarised the main tasks required in the conversion of the transcript documents to corpus files, and developed recommendations for a transcript notation system that would serve to optimise this process in the future. Collins and Hardie’s (Reference Collins and Hardie2022: 132) recommendations are largely designed ‘to generate minimal ambiguity when qualitative-research transcription data is mapped to XML or other structured format and operationalised as a searchable corpus’. An example from the ED data of the kind of ambiguity that such recommendations were created to address comes with the transcriber’s use of square brackets, which were used for the following purposes:

• Redacting personal information: ‘My name is [patient name].’

• Embedded turns: ‘I know it coming, the phlegm black. [D Mm mm] No more.’

• Describing contextual features: [background noise]

The alternative suggested by Collins and Hardie (Reference Collins and Hardie2022: 131) is to indicate different uses of square brackets using a flag character:

• Vocalisation: [@laughs]

• Transcriber comment: [#D fills in form]

• Embedded utterance: [=P yeah]

• Redaction: [name]

This minor adjustment to existing practice will not impede manual analysis but does make it entirely mechanistic to automatically convert the above to XML or another structured format, as follows:

• [@laughs] becomes <voc desc=“laughs”/>

• [#D fills in form] becomes <comment content=“D fills in form”/>

• [=P yeah] becomes <u who=“P” trans=“overlap”>yeah</u>

• [name] becomes <anon type=“person”/>

The designation and function of such flag characters can be adapted to the different levels of specification required for the study.

An extract of one of the transcripts is shown in Table 3.2, and the CASS team was able to use this tabulated format to automatically extract speaker information and spoken content, applying additional scripts to retain the non-speech material that also appeared in the rows in the column (sometimes marked with different formatting; e.g., bold font).

Table 3.2Extract of a transcript in the Emergency Department corpus

Speaker	Text
D2	And you had an angiogram eight years ago was it?
P	Mm, something like that.
D2	And they said you had a little bit of … blockage there but nothing too exciting?
P	Well they – because the blockage was close to a branch …
D2	Yes.
P	Ah, the surgeon said no, it’s too dangerous to operate. (background noise)

We can see in Table 3.2 how the rows of the table align the spoken material (and sometimes other contextual information) with a speaker ID, and when combined with the case file (i.e., the specific patient journey), this creates a unique speaker identifier (P27_D2), which was recorded in XML as follows:

This example shows the introduction of utterance boundaries, marked at the beginning (with additional speaker information) and the end, with each cell in the ‘Text’ column, as shown in Table 3.2, approximately mapped onto a speaker turn or utterance. Establishing utterance boundaries and linking these to speakers enabled the research team to subsequently carry out restricted queries and target speakers according to their metadata (e.g., only content provided by doctors and/or female speakers and/or speakers, aged 30–34). This restricted query functionality was used by Collins and co-authors (Reference Collins and Hardie2022) to investigate the frequency and type of questioning utterances as they were produced by doctors according to different levels of seniority. Finally, the CASS team was able to refer to the transcript notation (with additional manual checking) to separate contextual information and non-speech material from the content in the ‘Text’ cells and convert them to a format that would exclude them from token counts and content queries, as follows:

Figure 3.2 demonstrates how the extract appeared, following conversion, in the extended context view of CQPweb. This includes the reformatting of pauses to minimise the potential ambiguity of using ellipses, ‘(…)’, by using the alternative, more clearly defined notation ‘(.)’.

Figure 3.2 A passage of the transcript as it appears in the extended context view of CQPweb.

Figure 3.2Long description

The passage reads P 27 underscore D 2: And you had an angiogram eight years ago was it? P 27 underscore P: Mm, something like that. P 27 underscore D 2: And they said you had a little bit of (.) blockage there but nothing too exciting? P 27 underscore P: Well they - because the blockage was close to a branch. (.) P 27 underscore D 2: Yes. P 27 underscore P: Ah, the surgeon said no, it’s too dangerous to operate. At the bottom, it reads background noise.

As shown earlier in Figure 3.1, the metadata associated with each patient journey was also documented according to a template. The ICH team, however, was working in highly dynamic environments, striving to minimise the disruption to the natural flow of events caused by their presence. As such, as is the case with most large-scale data-collection studies, some details were not recorded and there is variability in the form of the metadata that was collected. For instance, participant ages were indicated to different levels of specificity (‘22’, ‘mid-30s’, ‘young’) and based on the researcher’s approximation. The CASS team thus devised a regularised categorisation scheme for age (i.e., 18–24, 25–29, 30–4, 35–9, etc.) and other metadata that allowed us to retain a large portion of the recorded information while also supporting combinations of restricted corpus queries (e.g., selecting 30–4 and 35–9 would facilitate a search of content produced by speakers in their thirties).

We recommend comprehensively documenting contextual information for current and future research projects. However, researchers may be working with data which was produced and archived in the past and for which such information needs to be recovered. In the next section, we discuss what this can involve for corpus compilation.

3.4.1 Vaccine Hesitancy in History

We begin with the motivation for building the VicVaDis corpus. Vaccinations are well known to be the focus of present-day controversies. On the one hand, they are deemed to be one of the most effective public health tools and have made it possible to eradicate or reduce the impact of a wide range of infectious diseases, including smallpox, polio, tetanus, meningitis, yellow fever, measles, Ebola and, most recently, COVID-19 (WHO, 2022). On the other hand, in 2019 the World Health Organization included among the top 10 threats to global health ‘vaccine hesitancy’, which they defined as ‘the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate despite the availability of vaccines’ (WHO, 2019). Indeed, vaccine hesitancy has affected vaccination programmes in 90 per cent of countries in the world (Lancet, 2019) and was further highlighted as a major public health concern during the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., Hughes et al., Reference Hughes, Miller-Idriss, Piltch-Loeb, Goldberg, White, Criezis and Savoia2021).

The spread of anti-vaccination arguments has also been associated with the internet and the rise of social media (e.g., Nuwarda et al., Reference Nuwarda, Ramzan, Weekes and Kayser2022). However, vaccine hesitancy is not in fact a recent phenomenon and has been a concern for as long as vaccinations have existed (Durbach, Reference Durbach2005). The VicVaDis corpus was built to capture the anti-vaccination movement that arose in the second half of the nineteenth century in England, during the reign of Queen Victoria, when the vaccine against smallpox was made compulsory for babies (Tafuri et al., Reference Tafuri, Gallone, Cappelli, Martinelli, Prato and Germinario2014). Smallpox was highly infectious and had a mortality rate of at least 30 per cent (Stewart and Devlin, Reference Stewart and Devlin2006). At the end of the eighteenth century, Edward Jenner, an English doctor, built on long-standing folk knowledge to assert that those who had contracted the milder illness cowpox were immune to smallpox. He subsequently introduced the first ‘vaccination’ (from Latin vacca) – that is, the practice of introducing material from the pustules of cowpox sufferers under the skin of a healthy person, causing a reaction that resulted in immunity to smallpox. Jenner is deemed to have saved more lives than any other person in history (Stewart and Devlin, Reference Stewart and Devlin2006), and following widespread vaccination campaigns, smallpox was declared eradicated by the Thirty-Third World Health Assembly in 1980.

In nineteenth-century England, however, mandates for vaccination and the use of material derived from animals were among the reasons that caused major resistance, manifested, for example, in a demonstration involving around 100,000 people in Leicester in 1885 (Charlton, Reference Charlton1983; Durbach, Reference Durbach2005). For insight into the vaccine-hesitant sentiment at the time, consider the following extracts from 2 of the 133 texts included in the VicVaDis corpus (Hardaker et al., Reference Hardaker, Deignan, Semino, Coltman-Patel, Dance, Demjén, Sanderson and Gatherer2024: 169–70):

The Victorian anti-vaccination movement has been studied by historians (e.g., Durbach, Reference Durbach2005), but prior to the creation of the VicVaDis corpus, there was no textual dataset that would enable large-scale linguistic studies of the anti-vaccination arguments of the time. The corpus was thus created to make it possible to carry out such studies, in order to complement historical research and to enable comparisons with present-day discussions of vaccinations, which already benefit from the availability of corpora (e.g., Coltman-Patel et al., Reference Coltman-Patel, Dance, Demjén, Gatherer, Hardaker and Semino2022). As we describe in more detail in the following sections, the VicVaDis corpus contains approximately 3.5 million words, drawn from anti-vaccination texts that would have been widely available to the population at the time.

3.4.2 Creating the Corpus

Hardaker and colleagues (Reference Hardaker, Deignan, Semino, Coltman-Patel, Dance, Demjén, Sanderson and Gatherer2024) began with a series of exploratory searches of online collections of texts covering the relevant historical period to establish how much textual material was still available on the topic of vaccination. This revealed that a substantial amount of such material still existed, particularly in three specific text archives: (1) the Wellcome Collection Library (https://wellcomecollection.org), (2) Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org), and (3) Online Library of Liberty (https://oll.libertyfund.org). The team used ‘vaccination’ as a search term to query all three text archives. Among other things, this led to the retrieval of A Catalogue of Anti-Vaccination Literature, which was issued by the London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination (the LSACV). This catalogue, which contains 205 texts, was used to identify any additional documents beyond those retrieved from the initial three archives. This led to more targeted searches in the UK Medical Heritage Library (UKMHL, www.medicalheritage.org), the British Library Nineteenth-Century Collection (www.bl.uk), JSTOR (www.jstor.org), and the Internet Archive (https://archive.org).Footnote ² Once these documents were retrieved, the criteria for including them in the corpus concerned topic, time, location, genre, and technical quality.

With regard to topic, the team only included texts that took an anti-vaccination stance. This was established by considering titles (e.g., The Evils of Vaccination: With a Protest against Its Legal Enforcement), consulting sources (e.g., the London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination) and, where necessary, becoming familiar with the texts themselves.

With regard to time period, the team considered the dates of the seven vaccination acts that were passed by Parliament in England with regard to the smallpox vaccine. The first such act dated from 1840, but it was the 1853 act that made mandatory the vaccination of babies by the age of three months, with the introduction of fines and imprisonment for parents who did not comply. Four subsequent acts introduced various changes in legislation but did not substantially change the mandatory nature of vaccination. This changed with the 1907 Vaccination Act (shortly after the end of Queen Victoria’s reign), which made it relatively easy for parents to opt out of vaccination without incurring penalties. This effectively marked the end of compulsory smallpox vaccination. Against this background, it was decided that the VicVaDis corpus would include documents published between 1854 and 1906.

With regard to place of publication, the researchers were interested in documents from England and Wales, where the vaccination acts applied. However, no documents published in Wales were retrieved from the various archives. Therefore, the VicVaDis corpus includes only texts published in England.

With regard to genre, the searches posed by Hardaker and colleagues identified a wide variety of types of texts that could be considered for inclusion:

• Pamphlets and popular journals produced by anti-vaccination campaigners

• Local newspaper reports and letters to local newspapers

• Papers presented to Parliament by John Simon in 1857 (e.g., cited by Williamson, Reference Williamson2007; Durbach, Reference Durbach2005)

• Letters from prominent doctors to various public bodies and publications

• Medical journals: The Lancet and the BMJ (analysed by Kondrlik, Reference Kondrlik2020)

• A summary of positions on vaccination in the Edinburgh Review (1810), a leading political and literary magazine (analysed by Williamson, Reference Williamson2007)

• Materials gathered in the Monthly Review, which predated the Edinburgh Review, aimed at non-specialist but educated readers (analysed by Arnold & Arnold, Reference Arnold and Arnold2022)

• Contemporary medical histories and textbooks (Hardaker et al., Reference Hardaker, Deignan, Semino, Coltman-Patel, Dance, Demjén, Sanderson and Gatherer2024: 165)

While this variety of texts was available for inclusion, the researchers’ primary interest was in non-fictional texts that were aimed for and accessible to the general public, namely pamphlets, newsletters, non-academic tracts and periodicals, and letters to newspapers. The corpus thus excludes fiction and drama, and legal, scientific, and medical publications. The reasons for this decision were as follows: Although literacy rates in England and Wales increased rapidly during the nineteenth century, specialist texts aimed for expert educated audiences had limited circulation, due to a combination of cost and venue of publication. They are also the texts that tend to be relied upon in existing historical studies. In contrast, more ‘popular’ texts have not been extensively studied but were in fact widely available to people at the time. Pamphlets, for example, were produced quickly and distributed cheaply or free of charge (Humphries, Reference Humphries2011). As such, the material included in the corpus can be seen as the closest equivalent at the time of today’s posts on social media.

With regard to technical quality, inclusion was based on the success rates of employing optical character recognition (OCR) software to convert the documents retrieved – mostly as PDFs – from the archives into a plain text format that could be processed by (corpus) software tools. Having tested the quality of different OCR tools, the conversion process was carried out via Adobe Acrobat, and a tailor-made Perl script was employed to identify words in the converted documents that included non-alphabetic characters, such as numbers and punctuation. A quality threshold of 70 per cent accuracy was then adopted as a criterion for inclusion in the corpus. In other words, documents with scores of less than 70 per cent were excluded. This was regarded as an adequate reflection of the error rate in the process of conversion.

Finally, in contrast with the creation of many other types of corpora, the VicVaDis corpus did not pose any issues of ethics and copyright. All relevant documents were in the public domain, and any copyright restrictions had long expired.

3.4.3 The VicVaDis Corpus

The VicVaDis corpus consists of 133 texts and 3,488,959 tokens calculated using the corpus analysis toolkit AntConc (Anthony, Reference Anthony2023). Texts vary considerably in length. The shortest is a 195-word letter to the East London Observer from 1985. The longest is The Anti-Vaccinator and Public Health Journal 1872–3, a 362,864-word anthology edited by John Pickering which includes letters, notes, public addresses, and reports. The texts involve 66 unique declared authorship designations. These include not just named individuals but also, for example, anonyms and pseudonyms (e.g., A Sufferer) and organisations (e.g., the LSACV).

The chronological dispersion of documents in VicVaDis is shown in Figure 3.3 (Hardaker et al., Reference Hardaker, Deignan, Semino, Coltman-Patel, Dance, Demjén, Sanderson and Gatherer2024: 7).

Figure 3.3 Chronological dispersion of texts in the VicVaDis corpus.

Figure 3.3Long description

The x-axis represents years ranging from 1854 to 1906 in increments of 2. The y-axis represents the number of documents ranging from 0 to 12 in increments of 1. The data depicted is as follows: 1854: 1. 1856: 4. 1858: 0. 1860: 2. 1861: 1. 1862: 0. 1864: 0. 1866: 3. 1868: 3. 1869: 1. 1870: 9. 1871: 9. 1872: 0. 1873: 4. 1874: 5. 1876: 4. 1878: 2. 1879: 4. 1880: 3. 1881: 6. 1882: 6. 1883: 5. 1884: 8. 1885: 2. 1886: 3. 1887: 3. 1888: 1. 1889:11. 1890: 1. 1891: 4. 1892: 2. 1893: 2. 1894: 3. 1895: 3. 1896: 3. 1897: 4. 1898: 3. 1899: 3. 1900: 0. 1901: 1. 1902: 2. 1903: 2. 1904: 1. 1905: 0. 1906: 4.

The mean number of texts per year is 2.5, but as Figure 3.3 shows, the number of texts per year varies, with no texts in some years and peaks in others (e.g., 11 documents in 1889). However, we should not necessarily consider the peaks and troughs as a reflection of the number of anti-vaccination documents published in different years. Rather, these figures are largely dependent on what was retrievable from the various archives, and on the error rate that resulted from OCR conversion.

Overall, for historical corpora such as the VicVaDis corpus, it is particularly difficult to reach the standards of representativeness and balance that are achievable in the creation of present-day corpora, such as the news corpus on obesity described earlier in this chapter. Hardaker and colleagues (Reference Hardaker, Deignan, Semino, Coltman-Patel, Dance, Demjén, Sanderson and Gatherer2024) explained this as follows:

It may in fact be possible to add further texts to the corpus if more documents are retrieved in the future and/or if improvements in the success rates of OCR conversion bring more documents above the 70 per cent technical quality threshold. Nonetheless, as shown in Hardaker and colleagues (Reference Hardaker, Deignan, Semino, Coltman-Patel, Dance, Demjén, Sanderson and Gatherer2024), even with its inevitable limitations, the VicVaDis corpus constitutes an important resource for the study of anti-vaccination arguments in the Victorian period, and for diachronic or cross-cultural comparisons of vaccination-related discourses. The corpus is freely available through the UK Data Service (https://reshare.ukdataservice.ac.uk/856736/).