Chapter 3 considers different approaches to data collection. Three case studies are included. The first study involves a purpose-built corpus of news articles about obesity. We focus on theoretical considerations attending to corpus design, as well as practical challenges involved in processing texts provided by repositories such as LexisNexis to make them amenable to corpus analysis. The second study focuses on how corpus linguists might work with existing datasets, in this case, transcripts collected by research collaborators conducting ethnographic research in Australian Emergency Departments. We discuss the ways in which data collected for the purposes of different kinds of analysis is likely to require some pre-processing before it becomes suitable for corpus-based analysis. The third study is concerned with the creation of a corpus of anti-vaccination literature from Victorian England. We discuss the challenges involved in sourcing historical material from existing databases, selecting a principled set of potential texts for inclusion, and using optical character recognition (OCR) software to convert the texts into a format that is appropriate for corpus tools.

Chapter 11 introduces the concept of legitimation in discourse and considers how it might function, and be studied, in the context of health(care) communication. First, we look at how contributors to the online parenting forum Mumsnet use labels denoting attitudes towards vaccinations. We point out how labels that involve opposition to vaccinations, such as ‘anti-vaxxer’ tend to collocate with negation, and then consider how people justify negating the applicability of the label to themselves. This reveals a range of different concerns around vaccinations. We then draw on a study of patient feedback in which we examined how patients legitimate their perspectives and the evaluations they gave in their feedback. For example, this included patients representing themselves as experienced users of healthcare services. Additionally, some patients used aspects of their identities to position themselves as requiring attention, while others used techniques such as employing second person pronouns to imply that their experiences could be generalised to other patients.

Chapter 8 is concerned with the use of historical corpora in the study of language relating to health. We present two case studies – one where an issue is well understood and discussed publicly, the other where there was a clear issue with the framing of a discussion. For the former study we explore the VicVaDis corpus, first introduced in chapter 1. We combine different corpus techniques to show the main anti-vaccination arguments in the corpus and to point out parallels with present-day anti-vaccination discourse. The second case study looks at the emergence of venereal disease in the seventeenth century using the Early English Books Online corpus. By examining collocates of the word pox, we are able to weed out relevant uses of the word (e.g., those which referred to venereal disease) as opposed to those which do not. Additionally, we show that through the investigation of one type of collocate (words referring to geographical locations) the analysis was taken in an unexpected but rewarding direction.

Misinformation and suspicion surrounding sexually transmitted HPV – along with the social implications of administering shots to young girls – significantly hinder worldwide uptake of the vaccine. The 2006 U.S. rollout hit a quagmire of public ignorance, suspicion and paranoia, and by 2020, just 61 percent of eligible U.S. girls had been vaccinated. In Japan, anti-vax sentiment led to an HPV vaccine ban, and in Denmark, the vaccine met similar resistance. Nearly twenty years after its introduction in higher-income countries, the vaccine is vastly behind its prevention potential; in lower-income countries, its trajectory has been abysmal. Hang-ups about sexually transmitted infections and baseless fears about the vaccine have made advocating its use a cause laden with stigma. In male-dominated cultures – and in the absence of an existing delivery system – a girls-only vaccine is often stopped before it can start. And yet, without a worldwide commitment to countering misunderstanding through trust-building, hundreds of thousands of women will miss their critical opportunity to beat this disease.