Written by Monika Bednarek and Gavin Brookes.

Note: This post was simultaneously published by the Sydney Corpus Lab and by the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University. It is published under a Creative Commons — Attribution Noncommercial license. If you want to republish it, please follow the relevant licensing guidelines.

Since 2020, the Sydney Corpus Lab has been collaborating with the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) at Lancaster University on a project on the representation of obesity in newspapers. We’re excited to announce that this project has now been completed.

The project involved collaboration with a range of scholars, both in Australia and overseas, including from disciplines outside linguistics and with scholars with lived experience of obesity. It also included collaboration with the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre (a multi-disciplinary research centre with focus on obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease) and with the Obesity Collective, an Australian umbrella coalition that works to raise awareness and reduce the health and wellbeing impacts of obesity.

Our collaboration started with designing and building a new corpus (the Australian Obesity Corpus), compiling a 16-million-word corpus of Australian news coverage of obesity (over 26,000 articles from 12 newspapers 2008-2019). The comprehensive corpus manual describes the corpus in detail. We selected initial foci of corpus investigation based on consultations with our research partner, the Obesity Collective, which also elicited feedback from the Weight Issues Network.

We collaborated on a series of corpus linguistic and computational analyses of the Australian Obesity Corpus. The corpus was also used by bio-philosophers from the Charles Perkins Centre in a study on genetic essentialism in obesity discourse.

Our corpus linguistic analyses focussed on issues such as:

• Person-first and identity-first language (the difference between saying person/people with obesity and obese person/people);
• The presence of stigmatising language;
• How weight loss is represented;
• Similarities and differences between Australian and British news representations;
• Comparisons of language use and media guidelines/recommendations.

As part of these studies, we developed a new linguistic framework for the analysis of weight stigma, which we hope will be widely used.

We disseminated our findings in presentations at conferences and workshops (9th Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines [CADAAD] conference; British Association for Applied Linguistics Health and Science Communication Special Interest Group workshop 2022; 12th International Corpus Linguistics conference [CL2023]) as well as in a suite of academic articles that are listed in the references below.

To supplement these academic outputs, we also wrote a blog post on constructions of weight loss in British and Australian newspapers. For the Obesity Collective, we developed a review of English-language media guidelines as a resource and also wrote an internal report on the words  obese and obesity in Australian newspapers.

Altogether, the activity we have undertaken as part of this collaborative project demonstrates the value of corpus approaches for identifying patterns of representation that can reinforce stigma, but also for identifying alternatives that might help to reduce or challenge such stigma. By identifying and documenting such patterns, and by comparing them with existing media guidelines, we hope that the work we have done can contribute practical, evidence-based insights which in time may support more careful and respectful reporting of this seemingly ever-newsworthy social issue.

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to the Ho Kong Fung Ling Research Fund at the Charles Perkins Centre, and the generous donation from Angela Cho that made it possible and the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) at Lancaster University (Grant reference ES/R008906/1). We also acknowledge internal funding and support from the University of Sydney (including through technical assistance from the Sydney Informatics Hub, a Core Research Facility of the University of Sydney) and research infrastructure support through the Australian Text Analytics Platform (https://doi.org/10.47486/PL074) and the HASS Research Data Commons and Indigenous Research Capability Program (https://doi.org/10.47486/HIR001).

Special thanks go to Tiffany Petre (Obesity Collective), Stephen Simpson (Charles Perkins Centre), and the Weight Issues Network.

References

Bednarek, M. & C. Bray (2023) Trialling corpus search techniques for identifying person-first and identity-first language. Applied Corpus Linguistics 3/1 [100046]: 1‑6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acorp.2023.100046

Bednarek, M., C. Bray, T. Coltman-Patel & C. Bonfiglioli (2026) Examining the uptake of media guidelines: A corpus analysis of obesity representation in Australian and UK news. In G. Brookes, N. Curry, & R. Love (eds) Applications of Corpus Linguistics. Established and Emergent Contexts. Cambridge University Press: 196-232.

Bednarek, M., C. Bray, D. P. Vanichkina, G. Brookes, C. Bonfiglioli, T. Coltman-Patel, K. Lee & P. Baker (2024) Weight stigma: Towards a language-informed analytical framework. Applied Linguistics 45/3: 424-448. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amad033

Collins, L. C., P. Baker & G. Brookes (2024) Representations of obesity in Australian and UK news coverage: A diachronic comparison. Applied Corpus Linguistics 4/2 [100092]: 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acorp.2024.100092

Reimann, R., K.E. Lynch, S.A. Gawronski, Chan, J. & P. E. Griffiths (2025)Classifying genetic essentialist biases using Large Language Models. The Review of Philosophy and Psychology 16: 1135–1165. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-025-00770-3

Vanichkina, D. & M. Bednarek (2022). Australian Obesity Corpus Manual. Available at https://osf.io/c2z5m/.