So, yeah, that was a nice introduction. I just had a bit more context. So I'm a linguist

and specifically I'm a discourse analyst. So I'm interested in how language, primarily,

but also other modes of communication like imagery and visuals, help to really construct

and shape our social realities. And today I'm going to talk about some work that I've

been doing looking at the language and images that we use when we talk about and communicate

about dementia. I'm going to talk about this work because I think it provides a nice demonstration

of the digitalized method but also the digitalized data. So I'll get back to that idea shortly.

Okay, it works. So I want to start with a bit of context about dementia itself. So dementia

is a syndrome characterized by progressive deterioration in the brain and this leads

to symptoms like memory loss and problems with thinking and coordination. The term

dementia doesn't refer to one specific disease. Many people would use it in that way but it's

actually an umbrella term as sort of demonstrated by this visual from Kate Swaffer. So it's

an umbrella term and there are actually over 100 different types of dementia. And the most

common type is Alzheimer's disease which I think most people have heard of but there

are lots of other types too. Dementia is a major global public health challenge. So in

the UK which is the context that I live and work in, dementia currently affects around

900,000 people but that figure is estimated to rise to 1.6 million people by the year

2040. There's presently no known cure for dementia. So it's a chronic condition and

that means that people who develop it and are diagnosed with it will eventually die

with it as well. However, and importantly for a point I'll make a bit later, while

people die with dementia they don't actually die of it. The most common cause of death

in people with dementia is actually pneumonia. So the work I'm presenting today is from the

public project called Public Discourses of Dementia. So the project's funded by UKRI

which is the main research funder in the UK and it's based at Lancaster University.

There are two of us working on the project. I'm the one on the left obviously. So I'm

the PI and I'm working with the brilliant Emma Putland who's the Senior Research Associate

on the project. And in this work we're exploring how dementia is represented across a wide

range of contexts of public communication focusing as I've mentioned on language and

imagery. So we're looking at things like the news, social media, online support groups,

public health campaigns, the language that charities use and most recently we've been

looking at generative AI and that's something I'll talk about later in this session.

Importantly we're working with stakeholders from the media and from charities and also

people from public health all with the aim of developing linguistically informed context

sensitive guidance and training that we can provide to those different stakeholders to

really help them to communicate about dementia in ways that reduce stigma and reduce the

shame around it but also promote some genuine awareness.

So the first question I want to consider today to demonstrate what some of the work we're

doing looks like is how is dementia represented in UK newspapers? And here I want to focus

in particular on how newspapers use metaphorical language to talk about dementia. And in this

work I've drawn on I guess the digital as method and specifically corpus linguistics.

So corpus linguistics for those, by a show of hands of people, are people aware of corpus

linguistics? Do people know? I'm curious who's heard of corpus linguistics? Oh great.

OK I can do this slide pretty quickly. There are still some that aren't initiated but yeah.

So corpus linguistics is essentially a collection of methods for studying linguistic patterns in

very large collections of naturally occurring language use or corpora. This language data

is stored in a digital format which means we can examine it using computer software

and because it relies on computer software in this way corpus linguistics methods are

quite well equipped to deal with very large data sets, digitised data sets, typically

millions of words, sometimes billions of words. So corpus is an electronic collection of naturally

occurring text which have been selected to be representative of a particular language,