My research broadly examines how people understand and communicate about health and illnesses and how such understanding and communication are enabled and constrained by social, political, cultural, and technological factors. My research is informed by the new paradigm of "big data" research, which marries the traditional interpretive and postpositive epistemologies to discover patterns of meanings and relationships in texts, videos, narratives, and social networks (interpretive epistemology) using scientific data processing methods developed in computer science and data science.