PLEASE JOIN US IN WELCOMING Michael stanley-baker, Ph.d. ON JUly 25TH, 2024 AT 6PM PT•7PM MT•8PM CT•9PM ET

This talk focuses on the historical insights and modern applications that can be gained from using the Polyglot Asian Medicine website.  We will investigate historical ideas about the emergence of early Chinese drug markets, and how GIS mapping of those historical placenames changes our ideas about the regions, the significance of the placenames, and the socio-technical practices that went on there. Furthermore, how should we regard ancient plant data – how confident can we be that they correspond to modern botany.

The second half of this talk then moves into examining the Polyglot Medicine Knowledge Graph.  When working with ancient plant names, how do we know the modern botany is accurate, and which modern botanicals should we rely on?  Who is using what kind of data?  You will learn how to search the database, find alternative names that may come up in rare literature, and what authorities make what kind of claims about the botany. Chinese drug terms link out to TCM databases in English and Chinese, as well as to bioactivity databases that show how the plants metabolise in the body. In addition, the botanical names are linked to modern biodiversity maps. This allows us to compare modern to ancient knowledge of biodiversity and growing regions.  Finally, combined with online AI recognition tools you can now find plants in the wild, and through the botany, link to their Chinese and traditional Malay medical usages.  This is the beginning of a whole new range of possibilities for medical wildcrafting, linking the field to the library to the laboratory through your device.

Author sourcing local fresh herbs in Bali, having identified them through Polyglot Asian medicine

Dr Stanley-Baker is a scholar of Chinese medicine and medieval Daoism at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. In addition to his historical training, he is also a certified TCM practitioner.  His print publications include the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine, Situating Religion and Medicine in Asia, and “Mapping the Bencao.” He is the leader of the Polyglot Asian Medicines project, which integrates ancient manuscript studies, modern ethnobotany, biodiversity, and biomolecular data science. He currently serves as the president of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine.

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