Big-Data Project on 1918 Flu Reflects Key Role of Humanists

By Jennifer Howard. A deadly virus arrives in America, carried by travelers from abroad. Health officials scramble to contain the threat, imposing quarantines and other strict measures even as they seek to reassure the public.
It sounds like the Ebola outbreak of 2014. But this scenario played out almost a hundred years ago, during the Spanish-influenza pandemic of 1918. Now a team of humanists and computer scientists has combined early-20th-century primary sources and 21st-century big-data analysis to better understand how America responded to the viral threat in 1918. More...