Lexicon of pandemics: a semantic analysis of the Spanish flu and the Covid-19 timeframe terminology
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-08-2021-0157 |
| Published date | 14 December 2021 |
| Date | 14 December 2021 |
| Pages | 933-952 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
| Author | Claudia Lanza,Antonietta Folino,Erika Pasceri,Anna Perri |
Lexicon of pandemics: a semantic
analysis of the Spanish flu and the
Covid-19 timeframe terminology
Claudia Lanza, Antonietta Folino, Erika Pasceri and Anna Perri
Department of Culture, Education and Society, University of Calabria, Rende, Italy
Abstract
Purpose –The aim of this study is a semantic comparative analysis between the current pandemic and the
Spanish flu. It is based on a bilingual terminological perspective oriented to evaluate and compare the terms
used to describe and communicate the pandemic’s issues both to biomedical experts and to a non-specialist
public.
Design/methodology/approach –The analysis carried out is a terminological comparative investigation
performed on two corpora, the first containing scientific English articles, the second Italian national
newspapers’issues on two pandemics, the Spanish flu and the current Covid-19 disease, towards the detection
of semantic similarities and differences among them through the implementation of computational tasks and
corpus linguistics methodologies.
Findings –Given the cross-fielding representativeness of terms, and their relevance within specific historical
eras, our study is conducted both on a synchronic and on a diachronic level to discover the common lexical
usages in the dissemination of the pandemic issues.
Originality/value –The study presents the extraction of the main representative terms about two pandemics
and their usages to share news about their trends among the population and the integration of a topic modeling
detection procedure to discover some of the main categories representing the lexicon of the pandemics with
reference to a list of classes created by external thesauri and ontologies on pandemics. As a result, a detailed
overview of the discrepancies, as well as similarities, retrieved in two historical corpora dealing with a common
subject, i.e. the pandemics’terminology, is provided.
Keywords Pandemics, Terminological evaluation, Topic modelling, Covid-19, Spanish flu
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
The paper addresses a terminological comparative analysis of the different uses of terms
referred to two historical pandemic periods, the Spanish flu and the Coronavirus Disease 19
(Covid-19). The purpose is to understand the level of similarities, specificity and
categorization in the terms employed both in journalistic sources regarding the past and
the current pandemic period and in the scientific documents, as to provide a cross-study of
their use within a popular and a medical framework referred to two global health
emergencies. Moreover, this exploratory study aimed at grouping the similar type of
information used to be disseminated throughout these two pandemics, particularly referring
to several spheres, such as (1) political, e.g. public speeches or press releases; (2) historical-
cultural, e.g. context as dependency factor to spread news about the pandemics;
(3) sociological, e.g. people reactions to the new health emergency situation and to the
restriction measures. More in detail, the primary objective of this paper is to categorize the
terminology used by the newspapers to spread news about the pandemics and see how close
the list of terms belonging to the popular dissemination of the Spanish flu is to the one related
to the Covid-19 health crisis. The same comparative configuration will be implemented for the
Lexicon of
pandemics
933
Authors have equally contributed to this work; however, Antonietta Folino particularly focused on
“Corpus construction”and “Term extraction”sections, Claudia Lanza on “Term categorization”section,
Erika Pasceri on “Introduction”,“Pandemic Terminology issues”and “Discussion”and Anna Perri on
“Historical background”and “Conclusions and future perspectives”sections.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0022-0418.htm
Received 13 August 2021
Revised 4 November 2021
Accepted 13 November 2021
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 78 No. 4, 2022
pp. 933-952
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-08-2021-0157
scientific set of documents in order to retrieve the similarities as well as the differences
between the two informative medical frameworks. In this way, the semantic lists obtained
including the representative terms about the two pandemic periods can be used as controlled
term sets for the execution of future computational tasks when performing predictive
analysis on documentary classification. The medical corpus of 1918–1919 and 2020 contains
documents written in English, which is the main language in the scientific communication
and reflects the specialized terminology used during two eras with a different scientific
knowledge; for both periods the collection of journal papers has been based on the use of the
same authoritative portals (e.g. Pubmed [1]). The journalistic corpus contains documents
written in Italian because we intend to focus on the Italian context and it has allowed us to
analyze how news was communicated to the general public during the two different historical
moments.
The paper is structured as follows: a brief historical context description, a terminological
overview, the methodological approach, a discussion followed by a conclusion and future
perspectives.
Historical background
The 1918 “Spanish influenza”pandemic
During the twentieth century, three major influenza epidemics have occurred in the world: the
Spanish (1918–1920), the Asian (1957–1958) and the Hong Kong flu (1968–1969). The Spanish
flu has been described as the most devastating epidemic in modern history. According to the
literature, it caused 50–100 million deaths worldwide; Italy had the highest mortality rate
(350,000–600,000 deaths) amongst the European countries (Jivraj et al., 2013;Ansart et al.,
2009). Many authors at the time claimed a close connection between the flu and the war, as it
arose within the military camps and the troop movements accelerating the spread of the
infection. However, the war censorship did not allow the creation of any sort of alarmism and
the pandemic used to be hidden by the various regimes (Tognotti, 2015;Winter, 2007).
The key featuresof Spanish flu were the morbiditypattern, as it affected mostlyyoung and
healthysubjects, and itsrapid progression, leadingto fatal multiorganfailure (Trillaet al., 2008).
The first etiological hypothesis of the epidemic flu emerged from autopsy findings, showing
bronchopneumonia with confluent foci, characterized by a strong hemorrhagic and purulent
mark, tissue hemorrhagic congestion,mainly in kidney and central nervous system (Polettini,
1919;Patriarca,2018). The pathologists hypothesized that the responsible agent was the same
as the epidemic arisen in 1890:the Pfeiffer bacillus (HaemophilusInfluenzae). This hypothesis
was supportedby the observationthat Spanish flu affectedmostly young peoplewho could not
have been immunizedduring the epidemic flu of 28 years before(Patriarca, 2018;Wever et al.,
2014), although this scientific debate occurred in the “pre-virologic era”. The RNA of H1N1
virus, responsible of the Spanish flu,was isolated by the pathologist Jeffrey Tautemberger in
1997,from a formalin fixed, paraffin-embedded lungtissue sample prepared duringthe autopsy
of a victimof the influenza pandemic in 1918(Reid et al.,1999). In 1918 the pandemic trend was
similarto the one observed in 1889–1890.In fact, the publichealth authorities expectedthe three
waves for the Spanish flu (i.e. the first, mild–August 1918–July 1919-, the second, virulent–
October 1919–July 1920 -, and the third, declining–August 1920–July 1921- (Fornasini et al.,
2018)). Nonetheless, the division among the pandemic’s periods seems not so well defined,and,
this led, by consequence, some disagreements withinthe scientific communitiesin defining the
exact duration of the pandemic waves.
The 2020 “COVID-19”pandemic
During the late 2019 a cluster of patients affected by unidentified pneumonia emerged in
Wuhan, China. The pathogen was soon identified, through the analysis of genetic sequence,
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