PULSES: Digital Palpation and the Global Health Humanities

This pilot workshop aims to visually translate haptic ways of knowing into interactive projection images. It will transform the diagnostic styles of pulse and palpation from text, to touch, to sounds and shapes. It begins with a primary source analysis of the twelfth century classic Mojue 脈訣 (1189) and compare it to its seventeenth century Latin translation Specimen Medicinae Sinicae (1682). Through a collaboration among medical scholars, cognitive scientists, and artists, this workshop invites creative coders to teach participants how to create responsive digital mapping for displaying biometric information. By introducing early modern non-English language sources into the new field of digital health humanities, this pilot workshop furthermore compares different diagnostic approaches to the body that remain otherwise overlooked in contemporary discourses of health practice.