This presentation will introduce the Wiki[Alt]Med corpus, a large collection of English-language Wikipedia content on topics relating to mainstream and alternative medicine. I will begin by explaining the rationale driving the construction of this resource, reflecting both on Wikipedia’s status in today’s digital mediascape as an influential – albeit controversial – site for the synthesis and global dissemination of medical knowledge, and on the methodological advantages of a corpus-led approach to analysing such mediation practices. This will then lead to a discussion of the design criteria and features of the Wiki[Alt]Med corpus, before I turn to highlight a number of current and potential avenues for research using the corpus. In this final section, I will draw particular attention to the potential of this resource in helping to address questions raised by SHE’s ‘Medicalisation of Democratic Rights in the Debate about Abortion’ (MEDRA) project.
Short biography on Henry Jones
Henry Jones is a Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Manchester, UK and Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded Wiki[Alt]Med project (2021-2023). He has been collaborating with members of SHE since 2017, initially as a post-doctoral researcher on the Genealogies of Knowledge project (PI: Mona Baker) and more recently as part of the team working on constructing the Oslo Medical Corpus. He is also a co-coordinator of the Genealogies of Knowledge Research Network and co-editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media (2021). His work has been published in international journals such as Translation Studies, Target, Globalizations and Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, and in edited volumes including the Routledge Handbook of Translation and Media (2022). His current research interests lie in the medical and health humanities, the sociology of translation, digital culture and corpus-based methodologies.
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