Text Mining the History of Medicine

Historical text archives constitute a rich and diverse source of information, which is becoming increasingly readily accessible, due to large-scale digitisation efforts. However, it can be difficult for researchers to explore and search such large volumes of data in an efficient manner. Text mining (TM) methods can help, through their ability to recognise various types of semantic information automatically, e.g., instances of concepts (places, medical conditions, drugs, etc.), synonyms/variant forms of concepts, and relationships holding between concepts (which drugs are used to treat which medical conditions, etc.). TM analysis allows search systems to incorporate functionality such as automatic suggestions of synonyms of user-entered query terms, exploration of different concepts mentioned within search results or isolation of documents in which concepts are related in specific ways. However, applying TM methods to historical text can be challenging, according to differences and evolutions in vocabulary, terminology, language structure and style, compared to more modern text. In this article, we present our efforts to overcome the various challenges faced in the semantic analysis of published historical medical text dating back to the mid 19th century. Firstly, we used evidence from diverse historical medical documents from different periods to develop new resources that provide accounts of the multiple, evolving ways in which concepts, their variants and relationships amongst them may be expressed. These resources were employed to support the development of a modular processing pipeline of TM tools for the robust detection of semantic information in historical medical documents with varying characteristics. We applied the pipeline to two large-scale medical document archives covering wide temporal ranges as the basis for the development of a publicly accessible semantically-oriented search system. The novel resources are available for research purposes, while the processing pipeline and its modules may be used and configured within the Argo TM platform

Literature review of the interplay between education, employment, health and wellbeing for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in remote areas

The availability of timely, comprehensive and good quality data specifically relevant to remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander notions of health and wellbeing has been a significant obstacle to understanding and addressing related disadvantage in a meaningful way. This literature review for the CRC-REP Interplay Between Health, Wellbeing, Education and Employment project explored existing wellbeing frameworks at global and local levels that are relevant to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in remote Australia.Current government frameworks that collect data about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people often produce a narrative that describes deficit, disadvantage and dysfunction. The frameworks include the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Performance Framework, the Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage Framework, the Australia Bureau of Statistics Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Wellbeing Framework and the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey. These frameworks gather statistical information for the purposes of policy analysis and program development and therefore use indicators that are important to policy. Increasingly, government frameworks are including holistic measures of health such as cultural health, governance and the impacts of colonisation.This literature review has identified the need to develop a wellbeing framework that not only accurately represents education, employment, health and wellbeing and the interplay between these and other factors, but that also recognises the strengths and resilience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait people as well as reflecting their worldviews, perspectives and values. For example, a definition of ‘wellbeing’ that highlights the importance of physical, social, emotional, cultural and spiritual influences at the level of the individual and the community has been endorsed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups and governments alike and sustained for over 20 years. Accordingly, this literature review has been organised along these topics.In addition, the literature suggests that optimal wellbeing occurs when there is strong cultural identity in combination with control, achievement and inclusion at a wider societal level, such as through successful engagement in education and employment. Listening to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to learn of their conceptual thinking, knowledge and understanding, and responding to their priorities and ideas are crucial parts of the policy equation to improve outcomes across education, employment, health and wellbeing. The challenges in developing an appropriate wellbeing framework, then, are ensuring the active involvement and participation of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.One example of how this has worked is provided by the Community Indicators Victoria Project, which used local-level data to address issues that the local community identified as important. A focus on strengths is also important, and is exemplified in the Social and Emotional Wellbeing Framework of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Council and National Mental Health Working Group. Various existing programs – such as ‘Caring for Country’ – can be adapted to capture data about connection to country, for example, and how that impacts on physical and mental health. Critically, the core domains of education, employment and health need to be extended to include activities and concepts that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people consider important to these areas.Recommendations for the development of a wellbeing framework are proposed here, derived from information available in the literature. Rather than being definitive, these recommendations provide a starting point for consultation and adaption towards establishing a wellbeing framework and operational system for collecting and analysing long-term health and wellbeing data for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in remote Australia as part of the research conducted by CRC-REP

Evolutionary Psychology Meets Social Neuroscience

This book aims to open a debate full of theoretical and experimental contributions among the different disciplines in social research, psychology, neuroscience, and sociology and to give an innovative vision to the present research and future perspective on the topic. The fundamental research areas of evolutionary psychology can be divided into two broad categories: the basic cognitive processes, and the way they evolved within the species, and the adaptive social behaviors that derive from the theory of evolution: survival, parenting, family and kinship, interactions with nonparents, and cultural evolution. Evolutionary Psychology Meets Social Neuroscience explains at individual and group level the fundamental behaviors of social life, such as altruism, cooperation, competition, social exclusion, and social support

Challenging Functional Decline as a driver of care for hospitalised older adults: A discursive ethnography

Functional decline (FD) is considered a critical issue in health care incurring significant human and financial cost. In hospitalised older adults’ care, FD is defined pervasively as decreases in level of socio-biophysical capacity for activities of daily living (ADL) such as personal care and mobility, understood to result in further functional impairment and loss of independence. The health care system is concerned about the associated prolonged hospital stays, diminished outcomes at discharge, and increased dependence and/or mortality. This thesis uses discursive ethnography to get up close to examine functional decline as a discourse (social practices that produce knowledge) focused on older adults’ decreasing capacity in the material actualities of hospital experiences. Seven patients, 75 years or older, hospitalised for surgical repair of a fractured hip due to a fall were followed from admission to discharge. Participant observations afforded a view into performances of care within nurse/patient interactions. Conversations and recorded interviews offering a place for older adults and their nurses to discuss the situation. Foucauldian discourse analysis explicated how assessment technologies, generated by gerontological research to predict which older adults at greatest risk for FD, are constituted by a FD discourse based on norms reproduced from ADL technologies. Production and distribution of this discourse in the literature and hospital contexts display how these technologies when redistributed into hospitals are not benign in their effects, but as FD imbued discourses of care produce knowledge that normalises and drives nurse/patient interactions within everyday care: constituting nurse and patient subjectivities contingent on how it is taken up, resisted, or ignored, as nurses and patients position within such interactions. This thesis exposes how FD as a discourse acted to effect such positioning, eliding other knowledges, ways of perceiving older adults and enacting care. It provides new understandings that challenge such elisions and singular approaches to provide alternative positions more likely to provide patient centred hospital care for older adults, despite the pervasiveness of the hegemonic discourses that dominate and structure health care systems

A Psychosocial Study of the Professional Recourse to the Adolescent Body in Education

A Psychosocial Study of The Professional Recourse to The Adolescent Body in Education examines formulations of the adolescent body in the major social establishments of education, psychiatry, politics, and law. The dissertation shows how the discontentments of adolescent subjectivity are linked to biological irregularities understood as objective realities. Despite the growing challenges posed by this visions and the difficulties it presents which remain unsolved, the non-dynamic view of the adolescent body survives as a chief organizing medium for relations of care in social establishments. This imaginary of experience maintains a belief system wherein adolescent subjectivity is premised upon being explained with accuracy and legitimacy, largely without question, despite the actuality that this vision is not supported by relevant evidence. These messages provide a paradox that frames the central inquiry in this dissertation: The stresses and sorrows that express the spectrum of ordinary and exceptional adolescent subjectivity show the striking ways in which the adolescent body is the site for the enactment of confusion, conflict and pain. The following intervention involves a concurrent analysis that explores the tensions between five approachesthe educational, legal, medical, psychosocial and popular genesis of the dynamic of adolescent subjectivity. I characterize the significant difficulties that arise when the genesis of adolescent subjectivity is taken to be determined by the gesture of a non-dynamic adolescent body that internalizes causes in the body and externalizes the work of care and its provision. The tensions in these approaches are taken up through a series of case studies drawn from medical, legal, and literary sources. Starting from a critique of the limitations that are inherent to the vision of the adolescent body as non-dynamic, throughout this dissertation I develop an alternative approach: Using case reasoning, I respond to these discourses, which still hinge on the phantasies embedded and persistent within institutional frameworks, by looking to the account of the adolescent body in psychosocial constructions that suggest that the difficulty of working with and responding to the disturbance in adolescence requires a shift in thinking about transition, transformation, and development

Benchmarking Machine Reading Comprehension: A Psychological Perspective

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) has received considerable attention as a benchmark for natural language understanding. However, the conventional task design of MRC lacks explainability beyond the model interpretation, i.e., reading comprehension by a model cannot be explained in human terms. To this end, this position paper provides a theoretical basis for the design of MRC datasets based on psychology as well as psychometrics, and summarizes it in terms of the prerequisites for benchmarking MRC. We conclude that future datasets should (i) evaluate the capability of the model for constructing a coherent and grounded representation to understand context-dependent situations and (ii) ensure substantive validity by shortcut-proof questions and explanation as a part of the task design.Comment: 21 pages, EACL 202