I’m just tuning in now to this panel, and I look forward to being able to follow up with questions. For now I just want to say that Dr Rose’s presentation so far is absolutely fascinating to listen to.

Thanks to all the speakers! I have a question that I'm happy for anyone on the panel to answer, as I think it relates to all your papers in some way. A lot of the time when we talk about natural disasters, we think about state responses and their success or failures. Are pandemics then inherently different to other natural disasters, in that effective state responses are so contingent on the consent of the people affected by them?

Thank you all for a really fascinating panel!

My question is for u/Dr_Cl0wnius with regards to your DH work. Do you see any value in archival digitization initiatives so that computational methodologies can be employed directly on the source texts themselves in addition to on the catalogue descriptions of these sources? Do you think if you had topic modelled the full texts of the General Board records your results would have varied from the results you got from the catalogue descriptions?

Finally, can you speak a little about why you chose latent Dirichlet allocation over something like latent semantic analysis in your own research?

Thanks again!

A very personal question for /u/Dr_Cl0wnius! As a sometimes user of The National Archives, I've always been a bit frustrated by the lack of good metadata available in the collections I use. Does this play into your own efforts to use the catalogues as sources? Conversely, do you think the growth of methods such as your own might encourage large archives to pay a bit more attention to improving the kind of record systems they use?

I'm still working through the (very interesting!) panel video, but I do have a question for any of the experts on sources. Environmental stuff especially often seems like a real peripheral detail in sources or papers. How difficult can it trying to study an environmental disaster, or disease, when its essentially a side line in a source? Do you have any suggestions on how to sort through all the 'noise' to focus on those particular aspects?

A very topical panel, especially these days. There's a lot of talk these days about how Corona is going to change the social landscape for ever. Did the historical problems mentioned create long term changes in social traditions or cultures, or did things eventually bounce back to a "normal"?

Considering the topical nature of many of these posts, do any of the experts think there are good lessons to keep in mind or put into action for us today?

Good morning and welcome to the “Pick Your Poison: Climate, Disease, and Human Disaster from the Middle Ages to Today” conference panel Q&A! Natural phenomena, from volcanic eruptions to pandemics, have obvious repercussions for humans throughout history. This panel explores the ways in which societies have responded to natural and environmental disasters from the Middle Ages to the present day.

Moderated by Stephanie Carlson (/u/CoeurdeLionne), this panel features:

Dr. Christopher Rose (/u/khowaga), presenting his paper, “The Importance of Epidemics for Social History”.

What is the difference between an epidemic and very successful virus? This paper examines the epidemic as a social event—demonstrating that a key part of the experience of an epidemic is how societies react to the presence of disease and the fear of death, and how they channel their anxieties and fears. In the present moment, Black Lives Matter has taken on a new life in the midst of the COVID-19 lockdown; while the mass protest in a time of quarantine has struck some observers as unusual if not illogical—in fact, such social upheaval in the time of epidemic is relatively common.

The historian Roger McGrew observed that "an epidemic intensifies certain behavior patterns [that] ... betray deeply rooted and continuing social imbalances." From protests over cholera in Europe in the 19th century, to the anti-Chinese ordinances of the San Francisco plague in 1907–08, and the revolutions and uprisings that followed the "Spanish" flu of 1918–20, this paper demonstrates how epidemics provide moments of social tension and abnormality that allow historians to gain insight into the everyday lives and worries of normal people—the poor, immigrants, and minorities—who might not otherwise have left written records.

Daria Berman (/u/dariabermanama), presenting her paper, “The Anti-Jewish Riots in the First Castilian Civil War”.

This presentation highlights the key aspects of economic, social, and demographic change that influenced the start of the anti-Jewish riots in the first Castilian Civil War (1355–1369) between Pedro I and his half-brother, Enrique de Trastámara. It addresses the effects of the Black Death on the social hierarchy in Iberia, mainly focusing on Castile, as well as Pedro I’s price controls that sought to resist inflation and his struggle to balance monarchical power with factions in the nobility. Underlying these social and economic changes, It highlights the increasing vulnerability of the Jews and the anti-Jewish riots that occurred throughout the civil war. It argues that in combination, the Black Death, the taxation system, and the monarchical tradition to exploit Jewish moneylenders, create a more cohesive understanding of the causes of the anti-Jewish riots and the civil war, a blame shared not only between Pedro I and Enrique de Trastámara’s armies, but the whole of the Castilian populace.

Chris Day (/u/Dr_Cl0wnius), presenting his paper, “Computing Cholera: Topic Modelling Catalogue Entries for the Correspondence of the General Board of Health (1848-1871)”.

The correspondence of the General Board of Health (1848–1871) documents the work of a body set up to deal with cholera epidemics in a period where some English homes were so filthy as to be described as “mere pigholes not fit for human beings”. Individual descriptions for each of these over 89,000 letters are available on Discovery, The National Archives (UK)’s catalogue. Now, some 170 years later, access to the letters themselves has been disrupted by another epidemic, COVID-19.

This paper examines how data science can be used to repurpose archival catalogue descriptions, initially created to enhance the ‘human findability’ of records (and favoured by many UK archives due to high digitisation costs), for large-scale computational analysis. The records of the General Board will be used as a case study: their catalogue descriptions topic modelled using a latent Dirichlet allocation model, visualised, and analysed – giving an insight into how new sanitary regulations were negotiated with a divided public during an epidemic. The paper then explores the validity of using the descriptions of historical sources as a source in their own right; and asks how, during a time of restricted archival access, metadata can be used to continue research.

​Adam Bierstedt (/u/sagathian), presenting his paper, “Galt margr óverðr þessa ófriðar: The Samalas Eruption, Unusual Weather, and the end of the Icelandic Commonwealth”.

In the mid-1250s, the Samalas volcano in Indonesia erupted in the single largest eruption of the Common Era. The resultant sulfate aerosol cloud expanded worldwide, causing global climatic disruption, apparently culminating in 1258. Ongoing projects detail multiple years of poor weather, crop failures, and related disease outbreaks. The Samalas eruption’s long-term effects coincide with the end of the so-called “Icelandic Commonwealth” and the submission of the Icelandic elite to Norway in 1264. It therefore is justifiable to explore the social impacts of this eruption, and whether they contributed to the decision-making process of the Icelandic elite.

Using comparisons with the Tambora eruption, this paper records significant environmental disruption, including a disease outbreak and ice surrounding Iceland, and contextualizes it in European climatic impacts generally. It explores how the literate elite interpreted the disruptive weather effects, and the ways in which it was and was not incorporated into understandings of the elite feuding of the end of the Icelandic Commonwealth.

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