Language Lab: rethinking medical communication through art and metaphor
"If your DNA is like a recipe book, a mutation is like a typo that causes you to make the wrong dish."
"Imagine you're a computer; the hardware is fine but your software needs some attention."
TREAT-NMD is collaborating on a research project with artist Marianne Wilde that will be looking at the ways in which doctors, patients and scientists communicate both visually and linguistically when explaining the complexity of genetic diseases. The use of linguistic metaphors is commonplace when interpreting the how, what, why and where of DNA and it is these types of metaphor that will form the basis of the investigation.
As TREAT-NMD coodinator Professor Volker Straub explains, "In a highly specialized and complex field like that of inherited muscle diseases, specialists tend to simplify complex facts related to genetic diagnosis, disease mechanisms and potential treatment strategies by using metaphors, analogies and models. Patients and families do the same thing when talking about their conditions. Based on our differing backgrounds we visualize and reflect on things in different ways and Marianne's project is exploring these processes by using art as a more general, non-linguistic concept. Particularly in a multinational, multilingual network like TREAT-NMD, this kind of project has the potential to give us new insights into ways of explaining the diseases we deal with every day."
Communications of this type are often referred to as scientific metaphors and are used generally throughout the scientific community. (Evidently the Milky Way looks like a fried egg.) These terms are often widely debated and are constantly being developed by scientists, writers, artists and indeed the general public.
This three year AHRC funded research project is being carried out by Marianne at Northumbria University and is entitled Words as things: visual metaphors and scientific explanations in the context of arts and health research. Over the course of the project the metaphorical language used within the network will be collected, interpreted into visual art forms and an archive created.
By identifying gaps in communication between the network stakeholders of TREAT-NMD and studying how linguistic, visual and artefactual metaphors impact on the construction of technical explanations within this network it is hoped that we can come closer to answering how we can make a ‘thing’ that we cannot see into something that we can say? Or, conversely, how can we make a ‘thing’ that we cannot say into something that we can see?
You can follow the project and contribute by adding metaphors at the Language Lab website, which can be found at www.theartoftreat-nmd.eu
