[video]

Abstract

For the last two hundred years, and especially for the last 60, primary accounts of illness experience written by patients have generated greater interest to help understand personal aspects of living and dealing with illness. Most recently, these accounts are finding their way into social media, blogs and internet resources, bypassing editorial revision and indexing. The materials offer vast potential for understanding the human experience of illness to help shape policy, inform professional education and help industry understand its markets. In this presentation we will look at examples of patient accounts and ask how algorithms and machine learning can expand human resources. We’ll also consider modern studies on life writing, a newer umbrella term in literary criticism covering biography, memoir, letters, journals and diaries as a resource. My goal is to stimulate the interests of the language processing community to look at these materials.

Biography

Dr Mostwin is a Professor of Urology, former director of the Course on Physician in Society in the JHU School of Medicine and former Co-Chair of the the Ethics Committee at the Johns Hopkins Hospital . He has recently been a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Center for Life Writing at Wolfson College Oxford, concentrating on biography, memoir and other forms of life writing of patients and practitioners.