This page includes details of the 3.5-million-word Victorian Anti-Vaccination Discourse Corpus (VicVaDis). The purpose of this corpus is to provide a (freely accessible) historical resource for the investigation of the earliest public concerns and arguments against vaccination in England, which revolved around compulsory vaccination against smallpox in the second half of the 19th century.
The corpus consists of 133 anti-vaccination pamphlets and publications gathered from 1854 to 1906, a span of 53 years that loosely coincides with the Victorian era (1837-1901). This timeframe was chosen to capture the period between the 1853 Vaccination Act, which made smallpox vaccination for babies compulsory, and the 1907 Act which effectively ended the mandatory nature of vaccination.
We hope that this dataset will be of interest to scholars in the social sciences and humanities such as historians, sociologists, and political scientists, and also to researchers and practitioners in clinical, medical, and general healthcare fields who may wish research early anti-vaccination discourse.
The full description of the corpus including a case study can be freely accessed in the journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities here.
Accessing the corpus
The VicVaDis corpus is freely available online and can be downloaded in full as a set of text files from either GitHub or the UK Data Service’s repository ReShare. Each data source also contains an appendix containing the full list of texts included in VicVaDis.