The Sustainability & Health Corpus (SHE), previously known as the Oslo Medical Corpus (OMC), is designed to support research-led educational programmes in global health delivered by the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education (SHE) at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo, as well as activities organized in collaboration with partners at the European University Alliance Circle U. It is also envisaged as a freely accessible resource from which the international academic community can benefit. Currently still growing, the SHE Corpus contains several million words of authentic medical and health-related texts that are sourced from many different parts of the world, and from both institutional and non-institutional sites. Our initial focus is on English because although it has not always been the primary language of science, it now constitutes its lingua franca, lending discourses which have emerged in English-speaking contexts considerable global influence. The corpus will however be extended in future to provide access to similar texts in other languages, further allowing SHE to fulfil its mission of incorporating global social, economic and environmental concerns into its educational agenda.
SHE believes in promoting innovative, research-led and digitally-supported educational strategies that can allow students to explore paradoxes and challenges freely, within an open, supportive learning environment. Our point of departure is that effective discussion of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in higher education requires robust engagement with the controversies they continue to generate. SHE therefore invests in developing and adopting teaching strategies that foster collaborative critical reflection rather than uncritical knowledge acquisition and application. Part of this strategy involves providing access to resources and tools that can enable a new generation of students to analyze healthcare discourse empirically, at a global level, and to offer multicultural and interdisciplinary learning spaces for understanding ethical dilemmas related to the implementation of the SDGs through productive disagreement.
The SHE Corpus and accompanying visualization software currently being developed by SHE are central to realizing these educational aims. For example, activities modelled on hackathons (events in which diverse professionals work together on software development) facilitate the collective analysis of corpus data in the classroom. Similar to hackathons, our datathons involve experts and students from different disciplines together in teams over a short period to tackle complex questions based on collective, live analysis of data. Designed as part of the Circle U Chair of Global Health agenda, such exercises promote informed reflection and debate and enhance students’ analytical skills. Datathons are envisaged as student-led, highly interactive and will consist of live, hands-on, brainstorming sessions in which students interrogate the SHE Corpus and are exposed to different and novel interpretations of the data arising from their own analysis or the analysis of other datathon participants. They are held as part of study programmes at the Faculty of Medicine and in collaboration with Circle U partners.
SHE’s educational agenda also includes organizing training the trainer workshops in which students and staff will be coached in conducting corpus-based analysis. The SHE Corpus ultimately offers an open access and continuously evolving resource for students and researchers at SHE, Circle U universities, and beyond.