title: Geographical Text Analysis: A new approach to understanding nineteenth-century mortality.
abstract: This paper uses a combination of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and corpus linguistic analysis to extract and analyse disease related keywords from the Registrar-General's Decennial Supplements. Combined with known mortality figures, this provides, for the first time, a spatial picture of the relationship between the Registrar-General's discussion of disease and deaths in England and Wales in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Techniques such as collocation, density analysis, the Hierarchical Regional Settlement matrix and regression analysis are employed to extract and analyse the data resulting in new insight into the relationship between the Registrar-General's published texts and the changing mortality patterns during this time.
authors.affiliation: Department of History, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YT, United Kingdom. Electronic address: c.porter2@lancaster.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Catherine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Porter
authors.affiliation: Department of History, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YT, United Kingdom. Electronic address: p.atkinson3@lancaster.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Atkinson
authors.affiliation: Department of History, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YT, United Kingdom. Electronic address: i.gregory@lancaster.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Ian
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Gregory
mesh_terms: D004739:England / Q000453:epidemiology; D040362:Geographic Information Systems; D049672:History, 19th Century; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D009026:Mortality / Q000639:trends*; D012042:Registries; D014852:Wales / Q000453:epidemiology
keywords: Corpus linguistics; GIS; Geographical Text Analysis; Infant mortality; Registrar-General