HIST4702 (2022-23) Digital History Project: SARS in Asia
Text Mining: Social and Economic Impacts of SARS in Hong Kong
Content |
The outbreak of SARS struck Hong Kong’s economies, especially via its effects on the city’s business activities and tourism sector. The following Voyant visualisations will display word links associated with this economic downturn. The two Voyant visualisations in this subpage are known as:
- Cirrus
- Links
Information of what they consist of will be provided below the visualisations.
Using Voyant
In the “Cirrus”, the size of the words correspond to its frequency in the documents! You can decide the number of frequently-used terms shown in the visualization by dragging the “term” bar. You may also select the word cloud of the entire corpus or different documents in the ‘scale’ column.
In the “Links” analysis, you can find the interesting connections between words by zooming in, when you stop on one of them, the links between words will be more obvious! You can select keywords that you would like to investigate on the bottom left corner
You can click the picture to jump to the Voyant tool to learn more about the correlations between terms and try out more different tools!
Cirrus of Words Related to Economic Impacts of SARS to Hong Kong
Description:
The outbreak of SARS has striked the economy of Hong Kong, especially business activities and tourism.
Links of Words Related to Economic Impacts of SARS to Hong Kong
Description:
The SARS brought a negative impact on Hong Kong Economy. Words like unemployment and underemployment show the employment situation was bad at the time, causing the labour a bad situation with no earnings.There were restrictions in the trade and tourism industry (travel bans) which affected the exports of goods and the hotel business respectively. The trade value was falling and the occupancy of hotels was low. Different industries were struggling on recovery. Terms like “China”, “mainland”, “Taiwan” and “Singapore” reflected Hong Kong were having a close relationship with these places in trade. The above resulted in a loss in Hong Kong’s GDP.
Cirrus of Words Related to Social Impacts of SARS to Hong Kong
Description:
SARS has a prolonged social impact on the patients and the general public in Hong Kong, mostly on the psychological health impacts.
Links of Words Related to Social Impacts of SARS to Hong Kong
Description:
The social impacts of SARS are mostly negative and inclined to be associated with psychological adversities. Different groups of people, especially frontline healthcare workers, displayed symptoms like panic, stress disorder and anxiety. People experienced financial crisis (eg. debt) during SARS and this led to a higher inclination to suicidal attempts. They also experienced mental crises including fear of going shopping and fear of getting infected. The only positive words are related to family and support. Positive, family and support are interrelated to each other and the solution to all the negative impacts of SARS mentioned above.
Comparisons between Aspects
We found that there are some connections between the results. First, the economic impact shows SARS brought a negative impact on Hong Kong’s economy. Different industries like tourism or trade were affected. This was explained through people suffering debts, a related negative social impact, which caused them to suffer from stress or commit suicide. The government also made adjustments on fiscal policies to overcome the different times. Second, in the social impact, we could see people were afraid of being infected by SARS. They feared having contracts with others or going shopping. Thus, the government prepared protective equipment, like facemasks or PPE, to prevent people from being infected. The government was trying to reduce the fear towards SARS at that time.
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