Digital Methods
The MHRC has a long history of employing digital methodologies in advancing humanities research on a range of issues within health and medicine. Founding director, Dr David Shuttleton (Reader in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Medical Culture, now retired), was awarded an AHRC Research Grant of £561,874 (2012–2015) to develop a publicly accessible, searchable on-line electronic edition of ‘The Consultation Letters of Dr William Cullen (1710-1790) at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh’. Today, researchers from communication studies and linguistics continue to draw on digital methods to develop new research projects. Dr Lindsay Balfour (Senior Lecturer in Communications (English Language & Linguistics)) uses social media discourse analysis to explore accuracy and misinformation in health and wellness influencers and uses discourse analysis, digital walkthrough, and co-creating policy to advocate for regulation around privacy and surveillance of health apps, particularly in their weaponisation as a form of intimate partner surveillance and coercion. Dr James Balfour (Lecturer in Stylistics) uses corpus linguistic methodologies to examine public discourses around health in the UK, focusing especially on schizophrenia and more recently, borderline personality disorder and online and public responses to assisted dying in Scotland. In 2023, he published a monograph examining the representation of schizophrenia in the UK press, entitled Representing Schizophrenia in the Media: A Corpus-based Approach to UK Press Coverage (Routledge). He is currently involved in a Leverhulme funded project (with Professor Marc Alexander) looking at linguistic polarisation in debates around assisted dying in Scotland.