Fifteen Eighty Four

This book has been fun and also somewhat liberating to write. To explain this we have to tell the story of how the book came about.

We are all corpus linguists, i.e. we use specialist software to study the use of language in very large datasets, or corpora. Over time, we all developed an interest in using corpus linguistic methods to study health communication – for example by looking at how people with obesity are represented in the media or how people with cancer use metaphors to talk about their experience of illness. We were lucky enough to be able to work on funded research projects at Lancaster University on different aspects of health communication. As part of this, we published our findings in journal articles, book chapters and research monographs, as academics do, and also tried to reach wider audiences via blog posts and media interviews.

This was all, of course, important and gratifying. But we also realised that many of the challenges we faced and the things we learned by doing the research were not written anywhere. This included the dilemmas that we had to face along the way, the problems that we had to solve, the compromises that we had to reach, the setbacks that we had to overcome, and the relationships that we had to develop and nurture. Much of this is inevitably edited out when writing about research, but this means that other researchers, especially those at the beginning of their careers, do not have a chance to learn from the experiences of the people who went before them.

In this book we present our corpus-based work on health communication in a way that we hope is suitable for readers who are not yet experienced in this kind of research, and we include the details that we think may be helpful but that we have not shared elsewhere. Therefore, we have structured the contents according to the chronological sequence of a research project: from formulating research questions, through collecting and analysing data, all the way to writing for other researchers and engaging with different kinds of non-academic stakeholders. As we go along, we also talk about the challenges involved in, for example, dealing with research questions formulated by non-linguists, handling the ethical issues posed by large health-related datasets, coping with the high turn-over of contacts in health services, and learning to write in new ways to engage medical audiences.

As well as focusing on a particular stage of research, each chapter presents two or three specific case studies on different health-related topics and different types of data. The health issues we consider include anxiety, psychosis, chronic pain, cancer, dementia, sexually transmitted diseases and obesity, as well as attitudes towards vaccinations. Most of our corpora contain present-day data but two are historical: a corpus of anti-vaccination literature from 19^th century England and a corpus of printed works in English published before 1700. The corpora also vary in terms of the genres they include (from news articles to online feedback on health services) and in how interactive they are (one corpus consists of interactions in hospital emergency departments). With regard to corpus methods, we demonstrate the use of well-established techniques, such as keyness and collocation analyses, but we also present analyses that push at the boundaries of what corpus methods can do, for example in handling change over time.

In the final two chapters we discuss successes and failures in trying to use our research to make a positive difference to the experiences of patients and health professionals, and we look ahead at future challenges and opportunities. We hope that the book provides insights and potential solutions for a wide range of issues and challenges that might be faced by corpus researchers in a health context, as well as inspiring new research in the field.