Corpus CoMe700
2016-2018; 2019-2021; 2021-2024
Funded by: University of Turin (Italy) until 2018, Remedia until 2024
Principal Investigator: Raffaella Scarpa
Corpus CoMe700: the Italian medical consultations in the XVII-XVIII centuries. The origins of the modern medical language is a research project dedicated to the language of the medical consultations written in Italy during a span of time that has been crucial in the definition of the medical language itself.
The aim of CoMe700 is collecting, transcribing, creating an interactive database and analyzing – with a specific focus on linguistic analysis – the whole corpus of the 18th century Italian medical consultations.
Spanish Flu Lab (1918-1920)
2021-2024
Funded by: Remedia
Coordinators: Gabriele Frasca, Raffaella Scarpa
Spanish Flu Lab is a transdisciplinary laboratory open to linguists, historians, literary scholars, medical historians, anthropologists, philosophers, cultural historians, historians of ideas, epidemiologists. Spanish Flu Lab is also open to any discipline wishing to participate in the debate on staggering collective forgetfulness that overshadowed the worst scourge of the 20th century: «the Spanish flu infected one in three people on earth, or 500 million human beings […]. In terms of single events causing major loss of life, it surpassed the First World War (17 million dead), the Second World War (60 million dead) and possibly both put together […]. When asked what was the biggest disaster of the twentieth century, almost nobody answers the Spanish flu» (Laura Spinney, Pale Rider, London 2017). Spanish Flu Lab promotes research, meetings, debates, scientific publications on this disconcerting removal; the aim is to understand its reasons and read, through the past, linguistics and symbolic forms of oblivion in the contemporary world.
The Medical School of Turin
2016-2017
Funded by: Piedmont Region, Italy (LR 58/1978)
Principal Investigator: Raffaella Scarpa
The Medical School of Turin: the medical consultations of the XVIII century kept in the libraries of Turin is a research project aimed at collecting and transcribing a corpus of medical consultations that have played a major role in the knowledge and diffusion of modern medical science.
The transcripts of the texts, together with the details of the project, can be found in the dedicated website [see].
Language and Mental Disease
2013-2015
Funded by: Department of Humanities at the University of Turin (Italy)
Principal Investigator: Raffaella Scarpa
Language and mental disease: history, methods and analysis is a research dedicated to mental disease through the lenses of language in a diachronic perspective.