ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Language of Materia Medica: Translating Knowledge in Plurilingual Infrastructures Bencao Corpora

• In Event: Global Knowledge(s): From Mono- to Plurilingual Research at the Intersection of Digital Humanities/AI, Language Corpora, and the Making of Scientific Knowledge

English Abstract

This paper situates the Bencao project within global efforts to digitize and model historical medical knowledge, and point to contemporary use. It shows how recipe language, ingredient names, and conceptual categories circulate across multiple linguistic and epistemic registers—classical, vernacular, and biomedical—and how database design negotiates the translation between them.

Author

• Michael Stanley-Baker