The Medico-Sanitary System of Barnaul in 1911–1913 Based on Materials from the Newspaper Life of Altai: A Computer-Aided Content Analysis Using MAXQDA

The subject of this study is the medico-sanitary discourse of the non-partisan socio-political newspaper Zhizn’ Altaya (Life of Altai, Barnaul) and its role in shaping the urban culture of health. The newspaper was not specialized in medicine, which makes it possible to examine how medical and sanitary topics were represented within the general informational space of a provincial publication. The chronological framework of 1911–1913 covers the formative stage of the newspaper’s section structure and thematic priorities. The aim of the study is to identify the patterns of formation and development of the medico-sanitary discourse in Zhizn’ Altaya through computer-aided content analysis, to determine the quantitative and semantic parameters of the publications, to reconstruct the forms of interaction between authorities, the professional community, and the population, and to assess the role of the provincial press as an instrument of sanitary education and urban modernization. The article combines computer-aided content and discourse analysis in MAXQDA 24 with traditional source-critical methods. The corpus includes 861 issues of Zhizn’ Altaya (1911–1913), manually coded according to a three-level scheme comprising five main categories and 99 subcodes, which made it possible to reveal quantitative and semantic regularities. The results showed that Zhizn’ Altaya developed a stable system of medical publications combining educational and communicative functions. The newspaper reflected the interaction between official and civic aspects of sanitary control, the growth of medical advertising, the participation of female professionals, and the social vulnerabilities of the urban environment. The scientific novelty lies in the first systematic application of MAXQDA to pre-revolutionary Siberian press for the reconstruction of medico-sanitary discourse. The computer-aided content analysis of the corpus made it possible to identify a stable thematic core (sanitary reviews, medical chronicles, epidemics, advertisements, and social narratives), to establish the absence of rigid inter-block correlations amid high event-driven reactivity, and to visualize the interaction between the sections Sanitary Inspections and Unsanitary Conditions as indicators of administrative and public control. Despite the poor preservation and selectivity of the surviving issues, the use of computer-aided methods helped partially compensate for the limitations of the source and confirmed the research assumptions regarding the gradual formation of urban sanitary culture, the increasing role of the press in public health education, and the institutionalization of medico-sanitary discourse. The results demonstrate the potential of historical informatics for analyzing provincial newspapers and refine our understanding of the interaction between authorities, physicians, and urban residents in the field of public health at the beginning of the XX century.