Can big data and the digital humanities change the way we study the history of medicine?

Weekly cases of scarlet fever, diptheria and typhoid in the Limehouse District, 1899.

On 11-13 April 2016 the Wellcome Library will join forces with the National Library of Medicine and Virginia Tech to deliver a free workshop for researchers in the history of medicine and digital humanities. Images and Texts in Medical History: An Introduction to Methods, Tools, and Data from the Digital Humanities will be funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The workshop will be hosted by the National Library of Medicine with additional support from the Wellcome Trust to enable a number of UK researchers to participate.

Over the past ten years the Wellcome Library has been leading the charge when it comes to the creation of digital resources for historians of medicine. But we are only just starting to understand what the consequences of these new data sources will be for research methodologies. Images and Texts in Medical History will involve presentations by leading scholars in digital humanities, who will demonstrate and discuss how emerging approaches to the analysis of texts and images can be used by scholars and librarians in the field of medical history.

Details of the funding available to researchers who wish to take part in the workshop will be publicized on the Wellcome Trust and Wellcome Library blogs later in the summer. Further details of the workshop are online at http://medicalhistworkshop.org/.

Author: Simon Chaplin is Director of Culture & Society at the Wellcome Trust.