Identifying Trends in WWII Era Public Health Films

The goal of this project was to assess to what extent digital textual analysis tools can be used to demonstrate attitudes and beliefs that underlie public health messaging within the National Library of Medicine’s “The Public Health Film Goes to War” archive, with hopes of further showcasing the extent to which they were a product of their time. Using digital media allowed me to more quickly and systematically analyze these videos, find points of comparison among the corpus as a whole,…

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The data for this project was derived from the National Library of Medicine’s “The Public Health Film Goes to War” collection, a series of eighteen health educational films, the majority of which are geared towards members of the armed forces, and all of which were created and distributed between 1940-1945.  Knowing that my primary source was created and distributed during a wartime climate and catered mostly towards a specific audience (members of the armed forces) this dictated expectation of what…

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I would like to thank Dr.Gordon Chang and Dr.Marie Saldaña of the History Department at Stanford University for their continued guidance and support throughout this project during the ideation and implementation stages of this project.

Archival Material:“The Public Health Film Goes to War: collection. National Library of Medicine Textual Analysis Tools:Voyant Tools : Utilized for text analysis in determining word frequency, associations, and related framing words ShelfWatch: A natural language processing tool. The named entity recognition feature was utilized to find unique locations, names, proper nouns, and other attributes within the corpus of text dataBasic.io: The samediff tool was utilized to directly compare scripts and find words both shared and unique to each text. It…

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Through the beginning of the 20th century, healthcare as an institution was poorly developed in the United States, and its government was only beginning to  assume public responsibility for the health of its citizens. Throughout the century growing knowledge in terms of science, disease spread, and disease control contributed to a growing public responsibility to manage contagion (Health). It was only until the period following World War II did healthcare rise to become a major U.S. institution. This was evidenced…

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