Exploring Digital Health: Insights from the IRCAHC Symposium
Events
The International Research Centre for the Advancement of Health Communication (IRCAHC), within ENGL, hosted its annual symposium, titled Corpus Approaches to Digital Health, on 3 June 2026, bringing together four eminent scholars of health communication at PolyU. These sessions focused on the nature of healthcare from perspectives based on corpus linguistics, digital health, and the role of GenAI in health communication. Prof. Paul Baker, Professor of ENGL, started off the talks discussing how anxiety is characterised in a corpus of online forum posts, followed by a talk by Dr Gavin Brookes (Lancaster University) on using corpora to examine health discourse. Dr Nial Curry (Manchester Metropolitan University) then gave a talk on Generative AI in health communication research, with Prof. Tony McEnery (Chair Professor of ENGL) providing a rapporteur summarising the talks. Prof. Paul Baker hosted a workshop in the afternoon detailing an online tool for using surprise words in corpus research. This hybrid event was attended by over 220 participants (including 50 in-person attendees).
