This study focuses on two widely circulating memes in the anti-vaccination movement, namely lists of vaccine ingredients containing mercury, and quotes attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. Mercury has been identified by conspiracy theorists as one of the most harmful components of vaccines, and Gandhi, who has condemned vaccination practices, has been celebrated as a significant source of authority. Quotes attributed to Gandhi against vaccination, complete with picture and embellished font, circulate across various popular platforms, as do intimidating images of syringes dipped in poison coupled with a list of seemingly occult or dangerous ingredients. This article analyses both memes, moving from the imageboard 4chan to the search engine Google Images,<em> </em>and illustrates how the repurposed, often ironic use of visual tropes can either undermine or strengthen the claims that accompany them. The aim is to explore the intersections of conspiracy theory, visual rhetoric, and digital communication in order to elucidate the ambiguity of memes as vehicles for the spread of controversial health-related information.

This article responds to a common critique of corpus-based studies as decontextualized exercises in linguistic analysis by illustrating how, in the case of internetbased data, the concordance line can reveal rather than obscure aspects of a textual body's cultural constitution. The data for the study consists of 100 articles of the online political journal ROAR (Reflections on a Revolution) Magazine, which has reported on global instances of public unrest and dissent since 2011. After sketching the relation between the financial crisis commencing in 2007 and the global protests that followed in its wake, the article investigates textual patterns within ROAR's varied output. These patterns, ranging from the collocational profile of the keyword democracy to quotation practices, are shown to be constitutive of a virtual sense of community. This process of identity formation is then shown to have a mythopoetic effect, which ultimately impacts the emplotment of the various events covered and considered by the magazine. Additional attention is paid to ROAR as a cross-platform enterprise. In this respect, the fragmentary nature of the Internet is shown to both facilitate and frustrate the creation of a symbolic sense of community.

Evidence-based medicine has been the subject of much controversy within and outside the field of medicine, with its detractors characterizing it as reductionist and authoritarian, and its proponents rejecting such characterization as a caricature of the actual practice. At the heart of this controversy is a complex linguistic and social process that cannot be illuminated by appealing to the semantics of the modifier evidence-based. The complexity lies in the nature of evidence as a basic concept that circulates in both expert and non-expert spheres of communication, supports different interpretations in different contexts, and is inherently open to contestation. We outline a new methodology that combines a social epistemological perspective with advanced methods of corpus linguistics and elements of conceptual history to investigate this and other basic concepts that underpin the practice and ethos of modern medicine. The potential of this methodology to offer new insights into controversies such as those surrounding EBM is demonstrated through a case study of the various meanings supported by evidence and based, as attested in a large electronic corpus of online material written by non-experts as well as a variety of experts in different fields, including medicine.

This paper seeks to promote deeper reflection within the field of corpus-based translation studies (CTS) regarding the digital tools by means of which research in this discipline proceeds. It explicates a range of possibilities and constraints brought to the analysis of translated texts by the keyword in context (KWIC) concordancer and other data visualisation applications, paying particular attention to the ways in which these technological affordances have actively shaped central theoretical hypotheses within CTS and related fields, as well as the general principles of corpus construction. This discussion is illustrated through a small case study which applies the suite of corpus analysis tools developed as part of the Genealogies of Knowledge project to the investigation of two English translations of the Communist Manifesto.

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