The dataset consists of 3871 examples of newspaper and internet journalistic articles in Russian language, mentioning HIV/AIDS from 1987 to 1997 and some of 1998-1999.
- Articles could have been published in Soviet, Russian and other post-soviet media outlets.
- Some of them are not dedicated to HIV but just mention it.
- Articles retrieved via digital archive of media in Russian
- This is not an exclusive list. Only those source that were available were included.
- Some articles might have been included by mistake, so the data is not perfectly clean.
Fields description
media_name - name of newspaper, online resource, medical journal
date - publishing date, can be date, only month+year, only year
txt - complete text of the publication. Can be a short news piece or a feature article.
file - reference file in the ZIP archive
Years
1987 - 7 texts
1988 - 16 texts
1989 35 - texts
1990 - 37 texts
1991 - 44 texts
1992 - 124 texts
1993 - 215 texts
1994 - 356 texts
1995 - 430 texts
1996 - 892 texts
1997 - 1288 texts
1998 - 7 texts
1999 - 420 texts
Additional files
Archive contains HTM files as exported from the digital library (HIV_files.zip). There’re more files than rows in the CSV file since some of them appeared to be empty (the library only head the headline or the page in the newspaper, or other reasons).
Why this dataset
The stigmatization of HIV and AIDS in the Russian language was a tragic and devastating phenomenon that left a lasting impact on society. The harsh rhetoric used to describe those affected by the disease fuelled fear, discrimination, and misunderstanding, ultimately hindering progress towards effective prevention and treatment. By studying the newspaper clippings from that era, we can gain a deeper understanding of the societal attitudes and prejudices.
Part of this dataset was collected while working on the investigation "When values kill. How the Russian Ministry of Health triggered an HIV epidemic".
The collage is designed by the author of the dataset and contains pages from the same newspapers that are mentioned.