The National Library of Medicine (NLM) will host the workshop Images and Texts in Medical History: An Introduction to Methods, Tools, and Data from the Digital Humanities on April 11-13, 2016. The event will be funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), part of the NLM's ongoing partnership with NEH, and held in cooperation with Virginia Tech, The Wellcome Library and The Wellcome Trust.
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.
Images and Texts in Medical History will engage key issues in the history of medicine that have contemporary and future relevance including, but not limited to, the spread of disease, the rise of health professions, scientific research, health policy, and cultural definitions of health and disease.
Images and Texts in Medical History will be a unique public forum involving a hands-on instruction interdisciplinary workshop and sessions open to the public that will provide historians of medicine and interested others with an opportunity to learn about tools, methods, and texts in the digital humanities that can inform research, teaching, scholarship, and public policy.
Participation in Images and Texts in Medical History will be free to workshop attendees and members of the public who wish to attend the open sessions. However, registration will be required in order to manage space and related requirements. Registration details will be announced this summer at www.medicalhistworkshop.org.
The confirmed participants in the Images and Texts in Medical History workshop include two digital humanists, Miriam Posner and Ben Schmidt, invited to provide instruction in tools and methods in two longer sessions, and a medical historian, Jeremy A. Greene, who will deliver a keynote address on the impact of new technologies on medical history. Other participants, including panelists, will be invited to take part once the workshop plans are finalized and in consultation with the planning committee.
The NLM's support of Images and Texts in Medical History follows-on its cooperative involvement in the April 2013 symposium Shared Horizons: Data, Biomedicine, and the Digital Humanities, which explored the intersection of digital humanities and biomedicine, and the October 2013 symposium An Epidemiology of Information: New Methods for Interpreting Disease and Data, which explored new methods for large-scale data analysis of epidemic disease.
